And thus it is that the law-material that our Civilization needs fits only in externals, or even not at all, with the Classical scheme of the law-books, and for the purposes of our proper jurisprudence and our educated thought generally is still formless and therefore unavailable. Are persons and things, in the sense of present-day legislation, law-_concepts_ at all? No! They merely serve to draw the ordinary distinction, the zoölogical distinction, so to say, between man and the rest. But of old the whole metaphysic of Classical being adhered to the notion of “_persona_.” The distinction between man and deity, the essence of the Polis, of the hero, of the slave, the Cosmos of stuff and form, the life-ideal of Ataraxia, were the self-evident premisses, and these premisses have for us completely perished. In our thought the word “property” is tied up with the Classical _static_ definition, and consequently, in every application to the dynamism of our way of living it falsifies. We leave such definitions to the world-shy abstract professors of ethics, jurists, and philosophers and to the unintelligent debate of political doctrinaires--and this although the _whole_ understanding of the economic history of this day _rests upon the metaphysic of this one notion_. It must be emphasized then--and with all rigour--that Classical law was a law of _bodies_, while ours is a law of _functions_. The Romans created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of “intellectual property,” let alone property in a practical notion or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or inventor or promoter is _a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces_, by giving direction, aim, and means to their action.[129] Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies. The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social, economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist. It demands: 1. An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic life of the present. 2. An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with constant comparison of German, English, and “Roman” development.