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Among the Romans, therefore, law was not primarily, as we conceive it, a command addressed by the sovereign to the whole members of the community, but primarily a contract concluded between the constitutive powers of the state by address and counter-address.
The first period, from February 24, or the downfall of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the date of the assembling of the constitutive assembly the February period proper may be designated as the prologue of the revolution.
A primal being cannot be said to consist of many other beings with an existence which is derivative, for the latter presuppose the former, and therefore cannot be constitutive parts of it. It follows that the ideal of the primal being must be cogitated as simple.
Would a revolution which had not paused before the iron gates of the Château of Versailles have respected the metaphysical distinction of power of two kinds! Besides, where were, and where would be now, the constitutive elements of two chambers, in a nation whose entire revolution is but a convulsion towards unity?
Still less is it a constitutive principle of reason authorizing us to extend our conception of the sensuous world beyond all possible experience. It is merely a principle for the enlargement and extension of experience as far as is possible for human faculties. It forbids us to consider any empirical limits as absolute.
We have seen that the image, like everything living, undergoes corrosions, damages, twisting, and transformation: whence it comes about that this remainder of former impressions varies according to its composition, i.e., in simplicity, complexity, grouping of its constitutive elements, etc., and takes on many aspects.
Differentia being seldom taken to mean the whole of the peculiarities constitutive of the species, but some one of those peculiarities only, a complete definition would be per genus et differentias, rather than differentiam.
On the contrary, if we treat becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no longer hovers over time, as an abstraction; it underlies time, as a reality. Such is exactly, on this point, the attitude of the philosophy of Forms or Ideas.
Thus, as we have already said, among the early Romans the family was practically a religious institution with ancestor worship as its constitutive principle. It is supposed by de Coulanges that in the earliest times the dead ancestors were buried beneath the hearth.
To wish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion as that of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutive essence of that point. We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct a picture with the qualifications which classify it. Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the concept?
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