"All property or rather all substantial determinations, which relate to my personal individuality and which enter into the general constitution of my self-consciousness, as for example, my personality proper, my freedom of volition in general, my morality, my religion are inalienable and the right to them is imprescriptible."

"That that which the mind is per se and by its very definition should also become an actual existence and pro se, that consequently it should be a person, capable of holding property, possessed of morality and religion— all this is involved in the idea of the mind itself, which as the causa sui, in other words, as a free cause, is a substance, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens. (Spinoza, Eth. S. 1. def. 1.)."

"This very notion, that it should be what it is through itself alone and as the self-concentration or endless self-retrosusception out of its mere natural and immediate existence contains also the possibility of the opposition between what it is only per se (i.e. substantially) and not pro se (i.e. subjectively, in reality) and vice versa between what is only pro se and not also per se (which in the Will is the bad, the vicious);—and hence too the possibility of the alienation of one's personality and of one's substantial existence, whether this alienation be effected implicitly and unconsciously or explicitly and expressly. Examples of the alienation of personality are slavery, vassalage, disability to hold property, the unfree possession of the same, &c., &c."

"Instances of the abalienation of intelligent rationality, of individual and social morality and of religion occur in the beliefs and practices of superstition, in ceding to another the power and the authority of making rules and prescriptions for my actions (as when one allows himself to be made a tool for criminal purposes), or of determining what I am to regard as the law and duty of conscience, religious truth, &c."

"The right to such inalienable possessions is imprescriptible, and the act by which I become seized of my personality and of my substantial being, by which I make myself an accountable, a moral and a religious agent, removes these determinations from the control of all merely external circumstances and relations, which alone could give them the capacity of becoming the property of another. With this abnegation of the external, all questions of time and all claims based upon previous consent or acquiescence fall to the ground. This act of rational self-recovery, whereby I constitute myself an existing idea, a person of legal and moral responsibility, subverts the previous relation and puts an end to the injustice which I myself and the other party have done to my comprehension and to my reason, by treating and suffering to be treated the endless existence of self-consciousness as an external and an alienable object." [2]

"This return to myself discloses also the contradiction (the absurdity) of my having ceded to another my legal responsibility, my morality and my religion at a time when I could not yet be said to possess them rationally, and which as soon as I become seized and possessed of them, can essentially be mine alone and can not be said to have any outward existence."

"It follows from the very nature of the case, that the slave has an absolute right to make himself free; that if any one has hired himself for any crime, such as robbery, murder, &c. this contract is of itself null and void and that every one is at full liberty to break it."

"The same may be said of all religious submission to a priest, who sets up for my father confessor (step-father, &c.); for a matter of such purely internal interest must be settled by every man himself and alone. A religiosity, a part of which is deposited in the hands of another is tantamount to none at all; for the Spirit is one, and it is he that is required to dwell in the heart of man; the union of the per and pro se must belong to every individual apart."