"Rights can be spoken of only on the condition that a person is thought as a person, that is, as an individual, or, in other words, as occupying a relation to other individuals, between whom and him a community, though not actually posited, perhaps, is at least fictitiously assumed. For those things which, through speculative philosophy, we discovered to be conditions of personality, become rights only if other persons are added in thought, who dare not violate those conditions. Free beings can not, however, be thought as coexisting at all, unless their rights reciprocally limit each other, that is, unless the sphere of their original rights changes into the sphere of rights in a commonwealth. It would seem, therefore, impossible to reflect upon rights as original rights, that is, without regard to their necessary limitations through the rights of others. …. There is no status of original rights for Man. Man attains rights only in a community with others as indeed he only becomes man — whereof we have shown the grounds heretofore — through intercourse with others. Man, indeed, can not be thought as one individual. Original Rights are, therefore, a pure fiction, but a fiction necessary for the purpose of Science."