Summary of Property - Encyclopedia #488 - 492

¤ 488 Mind, in the immediacy of its self−secured liberty, is an individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free will: it is a person, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in itself still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part, but on an external thing. This thing, as something devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, and is by that subjectivity made adjectival to it, the external sphere of its liberty − possession. ¤ 489 By the judgement of possession, at first in the outward appropriation, the thing acquires the predicate of 'mine'. But this predicate, on its own account merely 'practical', has here the signification that I import my personal will into the thing. As so characterized, possession is property, which as possession is a means, but as existence of the personality is an end. ¤ 490 In his property the person is brought into union with himself. But the thing is an abstractly external thing, and the I in it is abstractly external. The concrete return of me into me in the externality is that I, the infinite self−relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from myself, and have the existence of my personality in the being of other persons, in my relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is thus mutual. ¤ 491 The thing is the mean by which the extremes meet in one. These extremes are the persons who, in the knowledge of their identity as free, are simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has its definite recognizable existence in the thing by the immediate bodily act of taking possession, or by the formation of the thing or, it may be, by mere designation of it. ¤ 492 The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in this thing: so far my will is arbitrary, I can just as well put it in it as not − just as well withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a thing, it is only I who can withdraw it: it is only with my will that the thing can pass to another, whose property it similarly becomes only with his will: − Contract.