possible on the ground of a common nature. Natural right, _i. e._ the rightful relation between man and man, presupposes thus (3) a _civil right_, viz., (_a_) a free covenant, a compact of citizens by which the free individuals guarantee to each other their reciprocal rights; (_b_) positive laws, a civil legislation, through which the common will of all becomes law; (_c_) an executive force, a civil power which executes the common will, and in which, therefore, the private will and the common will are synthetically united. The particular view of Fichte’s theory of rights is this: on the one side there is the state as reason demands (philosophical theory of rights), and on the other side the state as it actually is (theory of positive rights and of the state). But now comes up the problem, to make the actual state ever more and more conformable to the state of reason. The science which has this approximation for its aim, is polity. We can demand of no actual state a perfect conformity to the idea of a state. Every state constitution is according to right, if it only leaves possible an advancement to a better state, and the only constitution wholly contrary to right is that whose end is to hold every thing just as it is. The absolute Ego of the Theory of Science is separated in the Theory of Rights into an infinite number of persons with rights: to bring it out again in its unity is the problem of _Ethics_. Right and morals are essentially different. Right is the external necessity to omit or to do something in order not to infringe upon the freedom of another; the inner necessity to do or omit something wholly independent of external ends, constitutes the moral nature of man. And as the theory of rights arose from the conflict of the impulse of freedom in one subject with the impulse of freedom in another subject, so does the theory of morals or ethics arise from such a conflict, which, in the present case, is not external but internal, between two impulses in one and the same person. (1) The rational being is impelled towards absolute independence, and strives after freedom for the sake of freedom. This fundamental impulse may be called the pure impulse, and it furnishes the formal principle of ethics, the principle of absolute autonomy, of absolute indeterminableness through anything external to the Ego. But (2) as the rational being is actually empirical and finite, as it by nature posits over against itself a non-Ego and posits itself as corporeal, so there is found beside the pure impulse another, the impulse of nature, which makes for its end not freedom but enjoyment. This impulse of nature furnishes the material, utilitarian (eudœmoniacal) principle of striving after a connected enjoyment. Both impulses, which from a transcendental standpoint are one and the same original impulse of the human being, strive after unity, and furnish a third impulse which is a mingling of the two. The pure impulse gives the form, and the natural impulse the