Inalienable, therefore, are those goods, or rather substantial determinations, and the right to them likewise imprescriptible, which constitute my own most personal being and the universal essence of my self-consciousness — such as my personality as such, my universal freedom of will, ethical life, and religion.

That what spirit is according to its concept, or in itself, should also be in existence and for itself (and thus be a person, capable of property, possess ethical life and religion) — this Idea is itself its concept (as causa sui, i.e. as a free cause, it is such a thing, whose nature cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing; Spinoza, Ethics I, Def. 1). In this very concept — of being, only through itself and as an infinite return into itself, out of the natural immediacy of its existence, what it is — lies the possibility of an opposition between what spirit is merely in itself and not also for itself (§ 57), as well as, conversely, between what it is merely for itself and not in itself (evil, in the will) — and herein lies the possibility of the alienation of personality and of its substantial being, whether this alienation occurs unconsciously or explicitly. – Examples of the alienation of personality are slavery, serfdom, incapacity to own property, unfreedom of ownership, and so forth; the alienation of intelligent rationality, morality, ethical life, and religion occurs in superstition, in conceding to another the authority and power to determine and prescribe for me what actions I ought to perform (as when someone explicitly hires himself out for robbery, murder, and the like, or for the possibility of crimes), or what is a duty of conscience, or religious truth, and so forth, for me. – The right to such inalienable things is imprescriptible, for the act by which I take possession of my personality and substantial being, making myself a being capable of rights and imputation, a moral and a religious being, precisely removes these determinations from that very externality which alone gave them the capacity to be in the possession of another. With this superseding of externality, the determination of time falls away, along with all the grounds that might be drawn from my earlier consent or acquiescence. This return of mine into myself, whereby I make myself existent as Idea, as a legal and moral person, supersedes the previous relation and the wrong that I and the other have done to my concept and reason, in letting, and having let, the infinite existence of self-consciousness be treated as something external. – This return into myself uncovers the contradiction of having given into another’s possession my capacity for rights, my ethical life, my religiosity — things which I myself did not possess, and which, as soon as I do possess them, exist essentially only as mine, and not as something external.