Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/305

289 as species from its own being as individual. This constitutes the inadequacy, or to use a Hegelian expression, the finitude of the plant. It is a manifestation, but not a revelation, of divine personality. But in the animal there is a most decided and important advance over the plant. The animal possesses feeling and power of self-movement. In the power of self-movement, the life power has reached a higher form of will. But in man, who possesses understanding, or the power to abstract from reality and to conceive reality as different from what it is, the will proper develops; for the will deals with realizing ideals and especially moral ideals. According to Hegel, the moral is the necessary form in which freedom must exist if it exist at all; hence in perceiving morality man perceives the nature of absolute being. Here we may understand the peculiar expression which Hegel employs in dealing with ethics, namely that the will wills itself—the will wills will in the ethical (see page 30 of this translation). The pure self-activity, being will, must act so as not to destroy its activity. It must reënforce its will; the particular will must will the general will. Thus will wills will, and freedom wills freedom.

In this work, Hegel first considers abstract right the province wherein the will first objectifies itself in conquering the world of nature, and in taking possession of it, and by this establishes the institution of property and realizes its freedom in property through contract. The will must not only take possession of things and use them, but it must be able to alienate them or transfer them to others. (Professor Dyde has translated Entäusserung by the word "relinquishment," not quite a happy translation of the word, which signifies alienation, or the legal act of transferring property to another person). Even in the idea of property itself we have the action of the social will together with the individual will. The individual possesses and wills to possess, and the community reënforces his will and supports him in this possession. But in the case of contract two wills enter explicitly. They unite in a higher will, the will of the community, which enforces contracts. In the phenomenon of wrong (Unrecht, which ought perhaps to be translated "trespass") we have the collision between the individual will and the social will, and hence a revelation of the necessity which is involved in the idea of right. Right must prevail, or else the social whole and all of the individuals composing it must be destroyed.

According to Hegel's peculiar method, the dialectic consideration of the idea of right in its abstract sense has brought us through the