What extension the concept "man" receives, and what comes to the individual man through it,--what, therefore, man and the human are,--on this point the various grades of liberalism differ, and the political, the social, the humane man are each always claiming more than the other for "man." He who has best grasped this concept knows best what is "man's." The State still grasps this concept in political restriction, society in social; mankind, so it is said, is the first to comprehend it entirely, or "the history of mankind develops it." But, if "man is discovered," then we know also what pertains to man as his own, man's property, the human.
But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man "entitles" him to them, _i. e._ because his being man does it: what do _I_ care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from _me_, then for _me_ he has no right. His life, _e. g._, counts to _me_ only for what it is _worth to me_. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the "sanctuary of his inner nature" (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain unaggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are _mine_, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my--might.
In the _property question_ lies a broader meaning than the limited statement of the question allows to be brought out. Referred solely to what men call our possessions, it is capable of no solution; the decision is to be found only in him "from whom we have everything." Property depends on the _owner_.
The Revolution directed its weapons against everything which came "from the grace of God," _e. g._, against divine right, in whose place the human was confirmed. To that which is granted by the grace of God, there is opposed that which is derived "from the essence of man."
Now, as men's relation to each other, in opposition to the religious dogma which commands a "Love one another for God's sake," had to receive its human position by a "Love each other for man's sake," so the revolutionary teaching could not do otherwise than, first as to what concerns the relation of men to the things of this world, settle it that the world, which hitherto was arranged according to God's ordinance, henceforth belongs to "Man."