ght to such inalienable possessions is imprescriptible, _and the
act by which I become seized of my personality and of my substantial
being, by which I make myself an accountable, a moral and a religious
agent, removes these determinations from the control of all merely
external circumstances and relations, which alone could give them the
capacity of becoming the property of another_. With this abnegation of
the external, _all questions of time and all claims based upon previous
consent or acquiescence fall to the ground_. This act of rational
self-recovery, whereby I constitute myself an existing idea, a person of
legal and moral responsibility, _subverts the previous relation and puts
an end to the injustice which I myself and the other party have done to
my comprehension and to my reason, by treating and suffering to be
treated the endless existence of self-consciousness as an external and
an alienable object_."[2]

[2] I emphasize this important clause for the particular
benefit of those who in my personal history have had the absurd
expectation that I should continue to entertain a respectful
deference to a certain phase of religionism, which upon a careful
and rational examination I found to be worthless and which is
repugnant to my taste and better judgment, and of others who with
equal absurdity are in the habit of exacting ecclesiastical tests (I
will not say religious, for such men show by their very conduct that
their enlightenment in matters of the religion of the heart is very
imperfect) for academic appointments;--as if the science and the
culture of the nineteenth century were still to be the handmaid of
the church, as they were in the Middle Age; _as if Philosophy and
the Liberal Arts could ever thrive and flourish in the suffocating
atmosphere of the idols of the cave, the idols of the tribe, and the
idols of the market-place!_

"This return to myself discloses also the contradiction (the absurdity)
of my having ceded to another my legal responsibility, my morality and
my religion at a time when I could not yet be said to possess them
rationally, and which as soon as I become seized and possessed of them,
can essentially be mine alone and can not be said to have any outward
existence."

"It follows from the very nature of the case, that the slave has an
absolute right to make himself free; that if any one has hired himself
for any crime, such as robbery, murder, &c. this c