any case to proceed with force in the intention of founding such a
union, and bringing into a juridical state such men as the savage
American Indians, the Hottentots,and the New Hollanders; or- and the
case is not much better- whether we may establish colonies by
deceptive purchase, and so become owners of their soil, and, in
general, without regard to their first possession, make use at will of
our superiority in relation to them? Further, may it not be held
that Nature herself, as abhorring a vacuum, seems to demand such a
procedure, and that large regions in other continents, that are now
magnificently peopled, would otherwise have remained unpossessed by
civilized inhabitants and might have for ever remained thus, so that
the end of creation would have so far been frustrated? It is almost
unnecessary to answer; for it is easy to see through all this flimsy
veil of injustice, which just amounts to the Jesuitism of making a
good end justify any means. This mode of acquiring the soil is,
therefore, to be repudiated.

  The indefiniteness of external acquirable objects in respect of
their quantity, as well as their quality, makes the problem of the
sole primary external acquisition of them one of the most difficult to
solve. There must, however, be some one first acquisition of an
external object; for every Acquisition cannot be derivative. Hence,
the problem is not to be given up as insoluble or in itself as
impossible. If it is solved by reference to the original contract,
unless this contract is extended so as to include the whole human
race, acquisition under it would still remain but provisional.

         16. Exposition of the Conception of a Primary

                  Acquisition of the Soil.

  All men are originally in a common collective possession of the soil
of the whole earth (communio fundi originaria), and they have
naturally each a will to use it (lex justi). But on account of the
opposition of the free will of one to that of the other in the
sphere of action, which is inevitable by nature, all use of the soil
would be prevented did not every will contain at the same time a law
for the regulation of the relation of all wills in action, according
to which a particular possession can be determined to every one upon
the common soil. This is the juridical law (lex juridica). But the
distributive law of the mine and thine, as applicable to each
individual on the soil, according to the axiom of external freedom,
cannot proceed otherwise than from a primarily united will a priori-
which does not presuppose any juridical act as requisite for this
union. This Law can only take form in the civil state (lex justitiae
distributivae); as it is in this state alone that the united common
will determines what is right, what is rightful, and what is the
constitution of Right. In reference to this state, however- and
prior to its establishment and in view of it- it is provisorily a duty
for every one to proceed according to the law of external acquisition;
and accordingly it is a juridical procedure on the part of the will to
lay every one under obligation to recognise the act of possessing
and appropriating, although it be only unilaterally. Hence a provisory
acquisition of the soil, with all its juridical consequences, is
possible in the state of nature.

  Such an acquisition, however, requires and also obtains the favour
of a permissive law (lex permissiva), in respect of the
determination of the limits of juridically possible possession. For it
precedes the juridical state, and as merely introductory to it is
not yet peremptory; and this favour does not extend farther than the
date of the consent of the other co-operators in the establishment
of the civil state. But if they are opposed to entering into the civil
state, as long as this opposition lasts it carries all the effect of a
guaranteed juridical acquisition with it, because the advance from the
state of nature to the civil state is founded upon a duty.

           17. Deduction of the Conception of the Original

                      Primary Acquisition.

  We have found the title of acquisition in a universal original
community of the soil, under the conditions of an external acquisition
in space; and the mode of acquisition is contained in the empirical
fact of taking possession (apprehensio), conjoined with the will to
have an external object as one's own. It is further necessary to
unfold, from the principles of the pure juridically practical reason
involved in the conception, the juridical acquisition proper of an
object- that is, the external mine and thine that follows from the two
previous conditions, as rational possession (possessio noumenon).

  The juridical conception of the external mine and thine, so far as
it involves the category of substance, cannot by "that which is
external to me" mean merely "in a place other than that in which I
am"; for it is a rational conception. As under the conceptions of
the reason only intellectual conceptions can be embraced, the
expression in question can only signify "something that is different
and distinct from me" according to the idea of a non-empirical
possession through, as it were, a continuous activity in taking
possession of an external object; and it involves only the notion of
having something in my power, which indicates the connection of an
object with myself, as a subjective condition of the possibility of
making use of it. This forms a purely intellectual conception of the
understanding. Now we can leave out or abstract from the sensible
conditions of possession, as relations of a person to objects which
have no obligation. This process of elimination just gives the
rational relation of a person to persons; and it is such that he can
bind them all by an obligation in reference to the use of things
through his act of will, so far as it is conformable to the axiom of
freedom, the postulate of right, and the universal legislation of