A law is an act of will, whose content is a series or class of actions. This definition excludes from the concept of law any empirical social determination; it includes within it all laws which are merely individual, the laws that the individual lays down to and for himself, the rules of conduct and programs of life and action, which the individual follows of his own accord. It may be objected that individual laws differ from social and political laws, because the latter are coercive and constrictive, while the former are not. There is no law, however, that is truly coercive; the individual is always free either to observe or not to observe the law. What a law does is to offer a choice or alternative, and this is as true of individual as of social laws. We may disregard our own rules of conduct or programs of action, and suffer from doing so, and inflict a punishment on ourselves for having done so; or we may alter our individual laws as social laws are altered when they no longer respond to the need of a community, and are either violently overthrown by rebellion or quietly allowed to fall into desuetude through non-observance, or modified by the proper organs of legislation. But the importance of the concept of individual laws lies in the fact that the so-called social laws have no reality outside the individual: in order to observe a law it is necessary to make it one's own, and to rebel against a law is to expel it from one's personality, of which it was, or tried to become, a part. The only real laws are, therefore, individual laws. If the criterion of sanction or coercion is insufficient to draw a distinction between individual and social laws, we can still less use it to divide the social laws into customs or unwritten laws, and political and juridical laws. Both customs and laws carry with them sanctions, though of a different order, or, to put it in more precise terms, both offer a choice between probable consequences to the free individual will. This distinction, like every other subdivision of the laws (civil, penal, national, international, laws and by-laws, etc.), is a purely empirical one. But the concept of law comprehends these and many more in which the jurists have no interest, such as the literary or artistic laws (that a tragedy should have five acts, or, as at one time in England, that a novel should fill three volumes), or the rules of religious life, or the precepts of chivalry, down to the statutes of a criminal gang and to Balzac's _droit parisien_. In fact, the empirical distinctions of the laws are coextensive with the empirical concepts of society, and partake of the same characteristics: to the preceding examples of laws correspond respectively the republic of letters, a monastery, the order of knighthood, a band of robbers, and _le beau monde_. But the only reality, both of the society and of the law, is the individual assent.