Strictly speaking rights and duties are correlative. Every right carries with it an obligation; not merely in the objective sense that when one man has a right other men are under the obligation to respect it, but also in the subjective sense that when a man has a right he is bound to use it for the general good. It is sometimes said, 'A man may do what he likes with his own.' Legally that may be true, but morally he is under obligation to employ it for the general good just as strictly as if it were another's. A man's rights are not merely decorations or ends in themselves. They are opportunities, instruments, trusts. And when any man has them, it means that he is placed on a vantage-ground from which, secure of oppression or interference, he may begin to do his duty.[6] But this moral aspect of right is often lost sight of. People are so enamoured of what they call their rights that they forget that the real value of every right depends upon the use to which they put it. A man's freedom does not consist in having rights, but in fulfilling them. 'After all,' says Mazzini, 'the greatest right a man can possess or recognise--the greatest gift of all--is simply the privilege and obligation to do his duty.'[7] This is the only Christian doctrine of rights. It underlies our Lord's teaching in the parable of the Talents. We only have what we use. (1) Much has been written of the 'Natural rights of Man.'[8] This was the claim of a school of political philosophy of {204} which Paine was the most rigorous exponent. The contentions of Paine were met as vigorously by the negations of Bentham and Burke. And if it be supposed that the individual is born into the world with certain ready-made possessions, fixed and unalterable, the claim is untenable. Such an artificial account of man ignores entirely the evolution of moral nature, and denies the possibility of development in man's conception of law and duty. 'It is,' as Wundt says, 'to derive all the moral postulates that have been produced in our minds by previous moral development from moral life as it actually exists.'[9]