Only when rights appear as individual and continually new work of individuals, only when the attention is directed to the spectacle of real life and not to the abstractions of legislators and dispenses with the dissertations of jurists, is it possible to state the problem: how does this juridical work coincide with, and how does it differ from moral work? And here too the comparison with language is fitting, although language be not logicity, yet logical thought cannot become concrete, save in speaking; so moral activity cannot live, save by translating itself into laws and institutes, and in the realization of laws and institutes, that is, in the juridical and economic activity. Finally, just as the history of a language is always arbitrary and abstract, so long as it is considered alone, outside the works in which the language is incarnate and the true history of a language is its poetry and literature, so _the true history of the rights of a people_ (of the rights that have really been executed and not merely formulated in laws and codes, be often proved to be a dead letter) cannot but be altogether one with _the social and political history of that people:_ an altogether juridical or economic history; a history of _wants_ and of _labour._ [1] Novelle, xl. VI HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS [Sidenote: _Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the history of the economic principle._] I. The history of the distinction between morality and rights is very important, precisely because, as has been said, it is the manifestation of the very strongly--felt desire to posit in some way a philosophy of the aethical or amoral practical form: a manifestation which is the most conspicuous of all those that we have had occasion to note on the subject (theory of politics, theory of the inferior appetitive faculty, theory of the passions, etc.).[1] And owing to the impossibility of satisfying that exigency with the intellectual data possessed, the problem of the relation between rights and morality has become anything but an amusing puzzle, a theme for true vain eloquence. Emmanuel Kant in the _Critique of Pure Reason,_ wishing to give a characteristic example of the difficulty of definitions, found nothing better to record than that jurists were always seeking a definition of rights, but had never succeeded in finding one.[2] And a jurist philosopher of our times (Jhering) has called the definition of rights, in their difference from morality, the "Cape Horn," or the Cape of tempests (or shipwrecks?) of juridical science. [Sidenote: _Indistinction up to the time of Thomas._]