Thus the same line may be drawn from opposite directions, and a
beast of prey with a muzzle is as harmless as a graminivorous animal. But
beyond this point the state cannot go. It cannot exhibit a phenomenon such
as would spring from universal mutual well-wishing and love. For just as
we found that from its nature it would not forbid the doing of a wrong
which involved no corresponding suffering of wrong on the part of another,
and prohibits all wrong-doing only because this is impossible; so
conversely, in accordance with its tendency towards the well-being of all,
it would very gladly take care that every benevolent action and work of
human love should be _experienced_, if it were not that these also have an
inevitable correlative in the _performance_ of acts of benevolence and
works of love, and every member of the state would wish to assume the
passive and none the active rôle, and there would be no reason for
exacting the latter from one member of the state rather than from another.
Accordingly only the negative, which is just the _right_, not the
positive, which has been comprehended under the name of obligations of
love, or, less completely, duties, _can be exacted by force_.
Legislation, as we have said, borrows the pure philosophy of right, or the
doctrine of the nature and limits of right and wrong, from ethics, in
order to apply it from the reverse side to its own ends, which are
different from those of ethics, and to institute positive legislation and
the means of supporting it, _i.e._, the state, in accordance with it.
Positive legislation is thus the inverted application of the purely moral
doctrine of right. This application may be made with reference to the
peculiar relations and circumstances of a particular people. But only if
the positive legislation is, in essential matters, throughout determined
in accordance with the guidance of the pure theory of right, and for each
of its propositions a ground can be established in the pure theory of
right, is the legislation which has arisen a _positive right_ and the
state a community _based upon right_, a _state_ in the proper meaning of
the word, a morally permissible, not immoral institution. Otherwise the
positive legislation is, on the contrary, the establishment of a _positive
wrong_; it is itself an openly avowed enforced wrong. Such is every
despotism, the constitution of most Mohammedan kingdoms; and indeed
various parts of many constitutions are also of this kind; for example,
serfdom, vassalage, and many such institutions. The pure theory of right
or natural right—better, moral right—though always reversed, lies at the
foundation of every just positive legislation, as pure mathematics lies at
the foundation of every branch of applied mathematics. The most important
points of the doctrine of right, as philosophy has to supply it for that
end to legislation, are the following: 1. The explanation of the inner and