aw in recent years a new phase of the
justification of property upon the basis of human nature has arisen.
This was suggested first by economists who deduced property from the
economic nature of man as a necessity of the economic life of the
individual in society. Usually it is coupled with a psychological
theory on the one side and a social-utilitarian theory on the other
side. In the hands of writers on philosophy of law it has often taken
on a metaphysical color. From another standpoint, what are essentially
natural-law theories have been advocated by socialists, either
deducing a natural right of the laborer to the whole produce of his
labor from a "natural" principle of creation or carrying out the idea
of natural qualities of the individual human being to the point of
denying all private property as a "natural" institution and deducing
a general regime of _res communes_ or _res publicae_.

Metaphysical theories of property are part of the general movement
that replaced seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theories of natural
rights, founded on the nature of the abstract man or on an assumed
compact, by metaphysical theories. They begin with Kant. He first sets
himself to justify the abstract idea of _a_ law of property--the idea
of a system of "external _meum_ and _tuum_." Here, as everywhere else,
he begins with the inviolability of the individual human personality.
A thing is rightfully mine, he says, when I am so connected with it
that anyone who uses it without my consent does me an injury. But to
justify the law of property we must go beyond cases of possession
where there is an actual physical relation to the object and
interference therewith is an aggression upon personality. The thing
can only be mine for the purposes of a legal system of _meum_ and
_tuum_ where I will be wronged by another's use of it when it is not
actually in my possession. This raises in the first instance the
question "How is a merely juridical or rational [as distinguished from
a purely physical] possession possible?" He answers the question by a
metaphysical version of the occupation theory of the eighteenth
century. Conceding that the idea of a primitive community of things is
a fiction, the idea of a logically original community of the soil and
of the things upon it, he says, has objective reality and practical
juridical reality. Otherwise mere objects of the exercise of the will,
exempted therefrom by operation of law, would be rai