the law in order to avoid the punishment or its recurrence; but he will also be able freely to rebel against it, as in the instance adduced. [Sidenote: _Identical characteristics of individual and social laws._] If compulsion be wanting to individual laws, this is because it is also always wanting to social laws: while, on the contrary, what is really present in social laws is equally present in the observances and rebellions, rewards and punishments of individual laws. To return to the former example: the individual who has decided to devote himself to agriculture as programme of life, may be seized all of a sudden with a great desire to devote himself to painting or to music; and what had previously pleased may henceforward displease him: that intimacy with mother earth, with harvests and vintages, which seemed to be the very life for him, his true ideal, may come to seem to him tiresome and repugnant. But if he be a serious person, if he do not will and not will at every moment, if he do not present in his own individuality a complete resemblance to those peoples who change in mid-November the laws made in October and proceed from revolution to revolution, he will examine his situation and will recognize, for instance, that the desire arisen in his soul is a velleity that does not answer to his true vocation and that the first programme must remain intact; hence will take place in him a struggle between that programme and the new rebellious volition. It may happen that in this case the individual will sometimes neglect the programme traced, in order to abandon himself to the temptations of his pictorial or musical dilettanteism; but since this will happen against his individual law, and since force must remain on the side of law, this breach of observance will be followed by special measures, such as the throwing away of brushes and violin, or by his forbidding to himself those moments of recreation in such amusements, which he used to allow himself and which have now become dangerous. In other words, the individual inflicts punishments on himself in case of the non-observance of his law, and these punishments must be held to be such in the strictest sense of the term. And if we accept the other hypothesis, analogous to that made in the case of social laws, should the individual find himself possessed with so vehement a desire of becoming a painter or a musician, as to be compelled to believe that the original programme, the original law of his individuality, did not correspond, or no longer corresponded with his true temperament, he will rebel against the law and destroy it in himself, in the same manner as in the other example the people destroyed the law of the despot, by fighting with him, imprisoning, or slaying him. [Sidenote: _Individual laws as in ultimate analysis alone real._]