One more remark should be made in regard to what is meant by property as a relation between persons and things considered as a means of developing personality. A convenient illustration is the use of a block of stone by a sculptor. The sculptor’s attempt at self-expression is an effort to combine two things in themselves uncongenial, an ideal image, and an external tangible thing, the block of stone. The mental image does not leap from the mind upon the stone and transform it magically into its own likeness. The external thing, the stone, offers resistance, and the resistance limits the artist’s effort. But the limitation itself becomes in time an indispensable aid. For the ideal image as at first it started up in the artist’s mind was vague, and the limitations imposed by the intractable nature of the material compel him to articulate the image, to grasp more firmly its complex details, and thus to become more surely possessed of it. The same is true of the mental thing which we call the relation of cause and effect in the mind of the scientist, and of his endeavor to impose this mental relation on the sequence of phenomena observed by him. And the same is again true of that supreme thing which we call the ethical ideal, and of the effort to embody it in the social relations. The attempt to express the ethical ideal in human society inevitably hits on limitations, and leads to frustrations. We have in our heads fine schemes of universal regeneration. We find elements in human nature that resent and resist our Socialisms, our communisms. We desire to enlarge men’s moral horizon, the field of their moral interest, to lead out from the family to the nation, to fraternity in general. We presently discover that we are losing the benefit of the closer ties. In the very process of building we seem to be in danger of destroying the foundations, and to be building in the air. In this way our formulations of the ethical ideal are tested. We are compelled to recast them, and the frustrations which we meet with become the means of clarifying and articulating the ideal itself, and of enabling us to experience more vividly the coercive impulses that go out from it. _The Right to Reputation_ The ethical rule is to show a sacred respect for the reputation of others. In the present discussion intellectual and moral reputation may be considered separately.