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 consequence whether this general idea be considered as psychological or as sociological, unless we precisely contemplate men who consciously maintain their own conception of their own social existence, in distinction from other ideas relating to it, chiefly when it is put in contrast to the idea of a political corporation, and the political corporation of highest import is concerned—the state. And it was exactly in these its shifting relations to the state that the idea of society proper—though without recognition of its subjective character—was evolved about fifty years ago by some German theorists—notably Lorenz Stein, Rudolph Gneist, and Robert Mohl—who were more or less strongly under the sway of Hegelian philosophy, seeing that Hegel in his Rechtsphilosophie develops his idea of human corporate existence under the threefold heading of (1) the family, as “thesis,” (2) civil society as “antithesis,” and (3) the state, as “synthesis” of the two former.

But, though I myself lay considerable stress upon this general notion of society, in juxtaposition and opposition to the state or political society, I still regard it as more indispensable to a theory of social structure to inquire into the nature and causes of what may be called, from the present point of view, genuine corporations; that is, those conceived of as being capable of willing and acting like a single individual endowed with reason and self-consciousness. The question arises how a “moral person” may be considered as possessing this power.

Evidently this is an impossibility, unless one single individual, or several together, are willing and acting in the name of that fictitious being. And in order justly to be taken for the volitions and acts of an individual distinct from their own individualities, those volitions and acts must be distinguishable by certain definite marks from the rest of their willing and acting, which they do in their own name; they must be differentiated formally. There must be a tacit or an open understanding, a sort of covenant or convention, that only volitions and acts so differentiated shall be considered as volitions and acts of the said moral person whom that one or those several individuals are supposed to represent. By the way, this question of marks and signs, consensual or