It was completely developed and reasoned out, with all the strictness that its erroneity permitted, in the doctrines of Kant and Fichte, who were the greatest of Thomas's scholars for this part of the study. Kant opposed _legality_ to morality; the juridical imperative is expressed with the formula, "act externally" (_handle äusserlich_); right is conjoined with the faculty of compulsion (_zwingen._) Hence his doctrines are often amoralistic or economic as regards individual juridical institutions, and this is especially the case when he deals with the State, with matrimony, and with punishment; these were followed by Fichte, who made some reservations for matrimony alone, considering it an institution not only juridical, but also natural and moral.[11] On the other hand rights were for Kant something that surpassed the individual will and utility; it was the sum of the conditions by means of which the will of the one can be united with the will of another, according to a universal law of liberty.[12] Fichte in like manner conceived of rights as altogether free of every admixture of morality; as an objective order, arising from the fact of the individual who coherently affirms himself and his own liberty, thus also affirming other individuals and their liberty.[13] Both philosophers thus preserve the moralistic concept of the legal and the _justum_; rights, although armed with compelling power, are never force alone, but the external ordering of freedom, namely, justice. For this reason, Kant explicitly excludes force, in so far as it is constitutive of rights and speaks of a "force without law"; and both he and Fichte make coercibility to flow, not from the nature of the volitional force itself, but from the violation of order. It is just, says Kant, to repel force with force, when it would interfere with liberty. The right of coercion (repeats Fichte) is founded solely upon the violation of the original right. But it remains obscure what this poor legality, justice, coexistence, and harmony of wills may be; what force may be and why and how it is connected with the preceding definition is not investigated. The distinction of the juridical from the moral sphere is announced and proclaimed more loudly than perhaps was ever done before or since; but to announce and to proclaim is not to carry out. If rights be changed into an ordinance more or less rational, to be identified with the concept of justice, one does not see how they can exist independently of morality. Kant and Fichte were prevented from conceiving the juridical function free from every element of morality or immorality, by the function which they assigned to compulsion (symbol of law), submitting it to ethical exigencies. In this uncertainty, there cannot be wanting and there is not wanting the thought that rights are not indeed an eternal category, but a historical and transitory fact; and as Spinoza had already said, _si