Belief in human progress is a modern attitude of mind. In the Homeric age, not men, but gods won the battles. Later, both in India and Greece, we find man's helplessness wrapped up in the doctrine of eternalism. Note that the Euclidian conception points to a completed world beyond our perception; and that the central doctrine of Stoics and Epicureans alike is self-control; while, in Christianity, not only nature and the social order, but human nature as well, are beyond man's power to regulate. Due, however, to man's original predisposition to manipulate things and his consequent, though largely accidental, success in science, we have entered upon an age of freedom of power over natural forces; and eternalism has ceased to hold sway over metaphysics.
Since the eighteenth century it has become possible to revolutionize the government by taking proper legislative and judical action: it is more difficult to change the customs and attitudes of the community itself and to this end current reforms are directed. Declarations of rights like that of the French constitution of 1795 seem to embody self evident principles but for us they lack definite content because the inherited dynastic power that stimulated them is no longer a condition which we face. They are abstract because that to which they refer needs, for us, only to be designated, not analytically defined. The political and economic individuals that seem to us so abstract were, in their day, concrete, every-day persons. They were designated by reference to hindrances to what, in the thought of the speculators, seemed vital activities. For Spinoza an understanding of the individual was largely an account of the emotions which were to be overcome, not an account of the positive content of reason, i.e., a mystical emotion. Hobbes, likewise, defined the individual in terms of hostile impulses threatening a warfare between all men, not in terms of the social state to which man rightfully belongs. Locke and Rousseau continued to express the rights of man in terms of negative conditions; and they left the good unformulated. In the struggle of labor for the right to combine, the contests have always been over specific restrictions Rights are always formulated in this way; thus their essential character is not revealed. Studies in the history of human culture show that rights did not exist prior to their recognition in society. Society gives the right its recognition. We are brought to the question of what beyond its recognition is involved in a right. In the notion of the common good as the end of both society and the individual we have a conception arbitrary to neither of these units. There is no limit to such common goods, and so no limit to rights, but they depend on circumstances and cannot be permanently formulated. In case of a variance between a common interest and an institutionally vested
