The person, as the immediate concept and hence also as essentially a single individual, has a natural existence, partly within itself, partly as one to which it relates as to an external world. – Here, in the case of the person, which is itself still in its first immediacy, the discussion concerns only these things as they are immediately, not determinations which they are capable of becoming through the mediation of the will.

Spiritual skills, sciences, arts, even religious matters (sermons, masses, prayers, blessings performed with consecrated objects), inventions, and so on, become objects of contract and are treated as acknowledged things, in the manner of buying, selling, and so on. One may ask whether the artist, the scholar, and so on, is in juristic possession of their art, science, or their ability to give a sermon, celebrate mass, and so forth – that is, whether such objects are things. One will hesitate to call such skills, items of knowledge, abilities, and so on things; since such possessions are, on the one hand, negotiated and contracted for as if they were things, while on the other hand they are something inward and spiritual, the understanding may find itself perplexed as to their juristic qualification, since it has before it only the opposition that something is either a thing or not a thing (just as either is infinite, or finite). Knowledge, sciences, talents, and so on are, to be sure, proper to the free spirit and something inward to it, not something external; but the spirit can just as much, through utterance, give them an external existence and alienate them (see below), whereby they are placed under the determination of things. They are therefore not immediately things in the first instance, but become so only through the mediation of spirit, which reduces its inwardness to immediacy and externality. – According to the unjust and unethical determination of Roman law, children were things for the father, and he was accordingly in juristic possession of his children, and yet he presumably also stood in an ethical relation of love toward them (a relation which, to be sure, must have been greatly weakened by that wrong). There was accordingly a union, albeit an entirely unjust one, of the two determinations of thing and non-thing. – In abstract right, which has as its object only the person as such, and hence also only that particular content belonging to the existence and sphere of the person’s freedom insofar as this content is separable from the person and immediately different from it – this being its essential determination, or it being obtainable only by means of the subjective will – spiritual skills, sciences, and so on come into consideration only in respect of their juristic possession; the possession of body and spirit acquired through education, study, habituation, and so on, and which is an inner property of spirit, is not to be dealt with here. The transition of such spiritual property into externality, in which it falls under the determination of a juristically legal property, is to be discussed only under alienation.

(It would be better to list this here as a kind of externality: alienation is the giving up of something already external that is my property – not merely the initial utterance of it.)