In the nineteenth century the conception of liability as resting on intention was put in metaphysical rather than ethical form. Law was a realization of the idea of liberty, and existed to bring about the widest possible individual liberty. Liberty was the free will in action. Hence it was the business of the legal order to give the widest effect to the declared will and to impose no duties except in order to effectuate the will or to reconcile the will of one with the will of others by a universal law. What had been a positive, creative theory of developing liability on the basis of intention, became a negative, restraining, one might say pruning, theory of no liability except on the basis of intention. Liability could flow only from culpable conduct or from assumed duties. The abstract individual will was the central point in the theory of liability. If one was not actually culpable and yet established legal precepts which were not to be denied held him answerable, it was because he was "deemed" culpable, the historical legal liability being the proof of culpability. If he had not actually assumed a duty, and yet established legal precepts which were not to be denied held him to answer for it, this must be because he had assumed some relation or professed some calling in which an undertaking to that effect was "implied" or had participated in some situation in which it was "implied,"--the implication being a deduction from the liability. The bases of liability were culpable conduct and legal transaction, and these came down to an ultimate basis in will. The fundamental conception in legal liability was the conception of an act--of a manifestation of the will in the external world.