Taking possession makes the matter of the thing my property, since matter is not, on its own account, its own.

Matter offers me resistance (and this is all it is — to offer me resistance), i.e. it displays its abstract being-for-self to me only as to an abstract spirit, namely as sensuous (sensuous representation perversely holds the sensuous being of spirit to be the concrete, and the rational to be the abstract); but in relation to will and property, this being-for-self of matter has no truth. Taking possession, as an external act, whereby the universal right of appropriating natural things is realized, falls under the conditions of physical strength, cunning, skill, and mediation in general, by which one gets physical hold of something. According to the qualitative diversity of natural things, their appropriation and possession have an infinitely manifold significance, and an equally infinite limitation and contingency. In any case, the genus and the elemental as such are not objects of personal singularity; in order to become such, and to be capable of being seized, they must first be singled out (a breath of air, a mouthful of water). In the impossibility of taking an external genus as such, and the elemental, into possession, it is not the external physical impossibility that is to be regarded as decisive, but rather that the person, as will, determines itself as a single individual and, as person, is at the same time immediate singularity, and hence relates itself, as such, to what is external as to singulars (§ 13 Rem., § 43). – Appropriation and external possession therefore also become, in infinitely many ways, more or less indeterminate and imperfect. Yet matter is never without essential form, and it is only through this that it is anything at all. The more I appropriate this form to myself, the more I also come into the actual possession of the thing. The consumption of foodstuffs is a penetration and alteration of their qualitative nature, by which, prior to being consumed, they are what they are. The training of my organic body into skills, as well as the formation of my mind, is likewise a more or less complete taking of possession and penetration; it is spirit that I can make my own most completely. But this actuality of taking possession is different from property as such, which is completed through the free will. Against this, the thing has retained nothing of its own peculiar to itself, even though in possession, as an external relation, an externality still remains. Thought must master the empty abstraction of a matter without properties, which is supposed to remain, within property, proper to something outside both me and the thing.