Incorporeality

“ This generation, by its labor, intelligence, and activity, creates products, develops values which did not exist on the uncultivated land. Is it not perfectly clear that the property of this industrious generation will stand on a basis of right, if the value or wealth produced by the activity of all be distributed among the producers, according to each one’s assistance in the creation of the general wealth? ”

“ This:—That there is a broad path open, through a creation of new wealth forms, to a new industrial system in which the productive forces of society and of nature may be used with far greater effectiveness than at present, and in which the distribution of the wealth forms so created will take place on a far juster and more equitable basis. Society may have more to divide among its members, and at the same time the greater dividend may be divided in a juster manner. ”

“ This strange defect in the primitive idea of the right of property, lingering so obstinately and so long, illustrates the difficulty which men have always experienced in carrying that idea from a simpler to a more complicated set of circumstances, and the easiness with which their perception of the relations to which it attaches becomes confused by any separation, whether real or apparent, of the thing from the person. But, in the evolution of our civilized social state, more complex forms of property have been coming all the time into existence. ”

“ And indeed, if we would fix a clear notion of an incorporeal hereditament, we must be careful not to confound together the profits produced, and the thing, or hereditament, which produces them. An annuity, for instance, is an incorporeal hereditament: for though the money, which is the fruit or product of this annuity, is doubtless of a corporeal nature, yet the annuity itself, which produces that money, is a thing invisible, has only a mental existence, and cannot be delivered over from hand to hand. ”

“ For this value or wealth, produced by the activity of all, is by the very fact of its creation collective wealth, the use of which, like that of the land, may be divided, but which as property remains undivided. ”

“ Far from being immovable, the conception of property has been modified in the course of centuries, and there is no doubt that it will be further modified in the future ... and it is certain that it is now going to evolve in the direction of greater complication, to richer complexity. ”

“ Were a society formed among several independent members, the most obvious rule, which could be agreed on, would be to annex property to PRESENT possession, and leave every one a right to what he at present enjoys. The relation of possession, which takes place between the person and the object, naturally draws on the relation of property. For a like reason, occupation or first possession becomes the foundation of property. Where a man bestows labour and industry upon any object, which before belonged to no body ”

“ Suppose that a person die without children, and that a dispute arises among his relations concerning his inheritance; 'tis evident, that if his riches be derived partly from his father, partly from his mother, the most natural way of determining such a dispute is, to divide his possessions, and assign each part to the family from whence it is derived. Now, as the person is supposed to have been once the full and entire proprietor of those goods, I ask, what is it makes us find a certain equity and natural reason in this partition, except it be the imagination? ”

“ But in spite of its widely different nature, the laws of inheritance that the social necessities of the old order of things established, have been applied to this new species of possession without remark. It is indestructible, imperishable wealth, subject only to the mutations of value that economic changes bring about. ”

“ No principles exhibited to the human family will suggest that a book, a bench, a house, a tree, or any growing or manufactured article, can be produced without a producer. All we know, all we see, hear, and understand, proves to us that there is no fabric without a constructor.
These reflections lead me to contrast the world with a people like this before me, a people endowed with intelligence and a knowledge of heavenly principles. ”

“ The diverse theories which came into discussion in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in England in 1769 and 1774, in France in 1793, and in Germany somewhat later, may be briefly summarised as follows:
1st. Property in an intellectual conception or creation is fully analogous to property in a material creation, and implies as comprehensive and unlimited a control for the production of the labour of the mind as that conceded by the community to the production of the labour of the hand. ”

“ We live under the dominion of capital, that is to say, of property other than land, or rather, perhaps, of an accumulated, and still accumulating, interest or dividend-bearing essence of all property (which is labour stored up in some material) , 107reconvertible at will, for productive purposes, into land, labour, or anything men have of exchangeable value. This mighty essence of all property is within the reach of us all, in proportion to our respective opportunities and abilities, and the efforts to gain possession of it we choose to make. ”

“ Where the properties of two persons are united after such a manner as neither to admit of division nor separation, as when one builds a house on another's ground, in that case, the whole must belong to one of the proprietors: And here I assert, that it naturally is conceived to belong to the proprietor of the most considerable part. ”

“ But farther, though it seems a very simple proposition to say, that nature, by an instinctive sentiment, distinguishes property, yet in reality we shall find, that there are required for that purpose ten thousand different instincts, and these employed about objects of the greatest intricacy and nicest discernment. For when a definition of PROPERTY is required, that relation is found to resolve itself into any possession acquired by occupation, by industry, by prescription, by inheritance, by contract, &c. ”

“ In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. ”

“ In all societies the increase of personal property, unlimited as it is, and accessible to all, equalizes the differences caused by the preponderance of landed property, which by its nature is limited in amount, and subject to a natural monopoly. In all societies the development of science, a domain open to all gifted men, equalizes the differences based upon the preponderating influence of experience and tradition, the inheritance of certain corporations and certain families. ”

“ In some of these, the person and the thing have been pushed apart to a wide remove from one another; in others, the association of ownership between them is subtilely conditioned by various circumstances and contingencies; in others, several persons are associated with the same thing, in common ownership, or with a succession of rights in it, or with rights that are various in degree; in still others, the thing which is the subject of property is a pure figment of the brain—the mere idea of a property-right which has itself become property by a convenient fiction. ”

“ The forms of society and the relations of its members are intimately connected with the forms of property which it maintains. Hand in hand with the development of production goes a development of property. So long as labor was performed with comparatively simple tools which each laborer could possess, it went without saying that he owned the product of his toil. But as the means of production have changed, this notion of property right has passed away. ”

“ And in these properties, whether great, or small, there will be incessantly at work two directly opposite tendencies. One in the direction of enlargement by inheritance, by marriage, and by larger increases of surplus capital, and of capital retiring from business. The other in the direction of subdivision, through the necessities, or the wishes, of their holders. These necessities may have arisen from the vicissitudes of business, the occurrences of life, and the extravagances and vices of their holders from time to time. ”

“ Why not, therefore, define property from the beginning as subject to limitations, and contrive a new form or system of it, in which these limitations shall for ever receive due recognition, and no man be thereafter denied the opportunity of acquiring as much of the bounty of nature as is necessary for him to carry out his personal development? ”

“ At the same time it was pointed out that while the influence of the entire aggregate on the individuals is seen in this forming of them into a society of the inherited type, the influences of local circumstances, and of individuals on one another, in each group, make them differentiate into appropriate social structures, taking on fit occupations and industries: the implication being that in virtue of their inherited natures they all have partial capacities for the various activities they undertake ”

“ Capital's contribution to industry is in the nature of material substance loaned by way of investment. Its possessor may be any kind of person, from a social parasite or ne'er-do-well, who is the inheritor of a fortune, to an infant totally incapable of any service to industry, and whose property is necessarily held in trust. ”

“ The objects being here to be consider`d as the property of the person, we are apt to join them together, and place them in the same light. Suppose, therefore, a great and a small object to be related together; if a person be strongly related to the great object, he will likewise be strongly related to both the objects, consider'd together, because he is related to the most considerable part. ”

“ For illustration, property relations are selected, not because the considerations to be dealt with are new to sociologists, nor because it is desirable to advertise individual opinions, but in order to make the point that, whether the assumptions behind this particular institution of property are tenable or untenable, there is call for such review and restatement of the principles of property that we shall have common premises for theory and practice with reference to details and applications. ”

“ In effect, in this latter system, the individual who is affiliated does not make a deposit of monetary unities having a value in themselves, he gives as a pledge a commodity, and according to the value of this commodity he is permitted to make use of more or less unities. ”

“ Another important class of cases in which a private person may create incorporeal ownership, is where an owner of things grants to another person an authority to transfer the title to them, or to use and enjoy them. ”

“ In short, a small object naturally follows a great one as its accession; but a great one is never suppos'd to belong to the proprietor of a small one related to it, merely on account of that property and relation. Yet in this latter case the transition of ideas is smoother from the proprietor to the small object, which is his property, and from the small object to the great one, than in the former case from the proprietor to the great object, and from the great one to the small. ”

“ One kind or sort of property is placed on a lower footing of dignity than the others, but at the same time is relieved from the fetters which antiquity has imposed on them. Subsequently, the superior convenience of the rules governing the transfer and descent of the lower order of property becomes generally recognised, and by a gradual course of innovation the plasticity of the less dignified class of valuable objects is communicated to the classes which stand conventionally higher. ”

“ Now, this is not only the original source from which333 all ideas of exclusive ownership arise—as is evident from the natural tendency of the mind to revert to it when the idea of exclusive ownership is questioned, and the manner in which social relations develop—but it is necessarily the only source. There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself. ”

“ For wealth must be produced: the whole of that community must live: and the possessors can make such terms with the non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors. ”

“ The division presupposed by individualization of property cannot be carried far without appliances which savage life does not furnish. Measures of time, measures of quantity, measures of value, are required. When from the primitive appropriation of things found, caught, or made, we pass to the acquisition of things by barter and by service, we see that approximate equality of value between the exchanged things is implied ”

“ It has, in this way, been commonly supposed, that, if all valuable wholes could be seen to have one and only one common property, the wholes must be valuable solely because they possess this property; and the illusion is greatly strengthened, if the common property in question seems, considered by itself, to have more value than the other parts of such wholes, considered by themselves. ”

“ Grant them to be derived from one stock, and the varieties of man yield proof upon proof that non-specific traits of structure are bequeathed from generation to generation. Or grant only their derivation from several stocks, and we still have, between races descended from a common stock, distinctions which prove the inheritance of minor peculiarities. ”