cause it is sure to end in death. This brutal and pitiless philosophy promises at least frank and close reasoning. Let us see if it keeps its promise.
“We talk very gravely about the conditions of property,…as if it was our province to decide what constitutes property.… It would seem, to hear certain philosophers and legislators, that at a certain moment, spontaneously and without cause, people began to use the words thine and mine; and that they might have, or ought to have, dispensed with them. But thine and mine were never invented.”
A philosopher yourself, you are too realistic. Thine and mine do not necessarily refer to self, as they do when I say your philosophy, and my equality; for your philosophy is you philosophizing, and my equality is I professing equality. Thine and mine oftener indicate a relation,—your country, your parish, your tailor, yourmilkmaid; my chamber, my seat at the theatre, my company and my battalion in the National Guard. In the former sense, we may sometimes say my labor, my skill, my virtue; never my grandeur nor my majesty: in the latter sense only, my field, my house, my vineyard, my capital,—precisely as the banker’s clerk says my cash-box. In short, thine and mine are signs and expressions of personal, but equal, rights; applied to things outside of us, they indicate possession, function, use, not property.
It does not seem possible, but, nevertheless, I shall prove, by quotations, that the whole theory of our author is based upon this paltry equivocation.
“Prior to all covenants, men are, not exactly, as Hobbes says, in a state of hostility, but of estrangement. In this state, justice and injustice are unknown; the rights of one bear no relation to the rights of another. All have as many rights as needs, and all feel it their duty to satisfy those needs by any means at their command.”
Grant it; whether true or false, it matters not. Destutt de Tracy cannot escape equality. On this theory, men, while in
