13. _(b)_ That by 'external' we mean that law, though it does supply motives to action, looks merely to whether the action is done, not to whether it is done from a particular motive 14. Law then _can_ only enjoin or forbid certain acts; it _cannot_ enjoin or forbid motives 15. And the only acts which it _ought_ to enjoin or forbid are those of which the doing or not doing, _from whatever motive_, is necessary to the moral end of society 16. The principle of 'natural law,' then, should be to enjoin all acts which further action from the highest motive, and no acts which interfere with such action 17. This principle would condemn much legislation which has tended, e.g., to weaken religion, self-respect, or family feeling 18. This, and not the principle of 'laissez-faire,' is the true ground of objection to 'paternal government' 19. The theory of political obligation (i.e. of what law ought to be, and why it ought to be obeyed) is not a theory _(a)_ as to how existing law has come to be what it is 20. Nor _(b)_ as to how far it expresses or is derived from certain original 'natural' rights 21. 'Natural' rights (like law itself) are relative to moral ends, i.e. they are those which are necessary to the fulfilment of man's moral vocation as man 22. This however is not the sense in which political obligation was based on 'natural rights' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, previously to utilitarianism 23. The utilitarian theory so far agrees with that here advocated that it grounds existing law, not on a 'natural' law prior to it, but on an end which it serves 24. The derivation of actual rights from natural (i.e. more primitive) rights does not touch the real question, viz. how there came to be _rights_ at all 25. The conception of a moral ideal (however dim) is the condition of the existence of rights, and conversely anyone who is capable of such a conception is capable of rights 26. Thus the consciousness of having rights is co-ordinate with the recognition of others as having them, the ground of both being the conception of a common good which _ought_ to be attained 27. Rights then can only subsist among 'persons,' in the _moral_ sense of 'persons,' i.e. being possessed of rational will 28. Though the moral idea of personality is later in formulation than the legal, and this again than the actual existence of rights 29. Rights which are directly necessary to a man's acting as a moral person at all may be called in a special sense 'personal' 30. Nor is there any objection to calling them 'innate' or 'natural,' if this means 'necessary to the moral development of man' in which sense 'duties' are equally 'natural' 31. Without a society conscious of a common interest there can be only 'powers,' no 'rights'. B. _Spinoza._ 32. Spinoza, seeing that 'jus naturae' = 'potentia,' and not seeing that it is not really 'jus' at all, identifies all 'jus' with 'potentia,' both in the state and in the individual