COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



and lost in the corporate existence of the aggre- 

 gate. Personal freedom was entirely unrecog- 

 nized. To family duties all individual rights 

 were subjected. By a tie, religious no less than 

 political, the members of the family were all 

 held in allegiance to its oldest male representa- 

 tive. The father might abandon his son in in- 

 fancy, and when grown up might sell him as a 

 slave, or put him to death for disobedience. 

 And the wife was to an equal extent in the 

 power of her husband, to whom she legally 

 stood in the relation of a daughter, so that mar- 

 riage was but the exchange of one form of ser- 

 vitude for another. N o transfer of property was 

 valid, unless the persons conducting it swore in 

 the name of some ancestor, — dead ages ago, 

 it might be ; for so absolute was the author- 

 ity of the paterfamilias that it could not be 

 conceived as departing from him at death, but 

 must be exercised by him, through the medium 

 of prescriptive ceremonial, over whole gener- 

 ations to come. Nothing, in short, was regu- 

 lated by contract, but everything was determined 

 by status} And this is the fact which irretriev- 

 ably demolishes Rousseau's theory that social 

 aggregation is due to a primitive compact. That 



1 This term is well defined by Heineccius : ** Status est 

 qualitas cujus ratione homines diverse jure utuntur. . . . Alio 

 jure utitur liber homo ; alio servus ; alio civis ; alio pere- 

 grinus.'* Re cita Hones, lib. i. tit. 3. 



