Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/515

489 KEENER ON QUASI-CONTRACTS. 489 of their voluntary forging, juridical responsibility is nothing but the force of the majority constraining the minority, and jurisprudence has no place except as a science of the will of the majority, which may change as it chooses, and therefore cannot be the basis of a rational science. Causality as the antecedent condition of juridical respon- sibility is thus the third postulate of jurisprudence, and obligation as the antecedent condition of juridical relation is its fourth postulate. Having ascertained then that, whatever may be the principle or universal element which makes society society, it must necessarily have the sanction of moral obligation, and having ascertained that the principle of reciprocity is that unitary principle of society, we must conclude that the principle of reciprocity is itself a principle of moral obligation, or in other words is a moral law. Indeed, in looking back upon our analysis, we can see that it is insufficient if it contents itself with finding that the condition of social exist- ence is summed up in a mere interdependence of individuals upon each other. The condition is more than that : it involves neces- sarily an obligation. Society and the individual alike are incapable of existence except under law. The possession of freedom is unin- telligible except as in and with responsibility for its exercise, and to speak of a free and intelligent but irresponsible being is in truth to speak a contradiction in terms. If, then, my argument is correct, the principle of society is the principle of reciprocity, and the principle of reciprocity is a law of obligation. Two things are to be observed about this law of reciprocity. It does not lose its quality as a condition in becoming a law, since it could not be that disobedience to it as a law should be fraught with less serious consequences than disobedience to it as a condi- tion ; and again its content as a law, the thing that it prescribes to be done, is precisely the same as the positive content of the organic law in the non-personal organism and in the organic uni- verse. It is in fact the organic law of the universe shorn of its quality of unconscious necessity, and given to the hands of freely volitional and intelligent beings as a trust obligation to be con- sciously obeyed. It is thus that the evolutionary nexus between man and the lower organic forms, historically actual as we now believe it to be, is also rationally possible, if not rationally neces- sary. In the process of evolution the organism becomes person ; in the same process the organic law becomes personal and the necessary becomes obligatory.