ysical deduction.
Moreover, like the metaphysical deduction, it accounts for an abstract
idea of private property rather than for the regime that actually
exists. Inequalities are assumed to be due to "greater strength,
greater ingenuity or greater application" of those who have acquired
more than their fellows. Hence, as the end of law is taken to be the
bringing about of a maximum of individual free self-assertion, any
interference with one's holding the fruits of his greater strength or
greater ingenuity or greater application, and his resulting greater
activity in creative or acquisitive self-assertion, would contravene
the very purpose of the legal order. It will be noted also that this
theory, like all that had gone before, assumes a complete _ius
disponendi_ as implied in the very notion of property. But does not
this also require demonstration? Is the _ius disponendi_ implied in
the idea which they demonstrate or is it only an incident of the
institution they are seeking to explain by the demonstration?

Historical jurists have maintained their theory on the basis of two
propositions: (1) The conception of private property, like the
conception of individual personality, has had slow but steady
development from the beginnings of law; (2) individual ownership has
grown out of group rights just as individual interests of personality
have been disentangled gradually from group interests. Let us look at
each of these propositions in some detail.

If we examine the law of property analytically, we may see three
grades or stages in the power or capacity which men have of
influencing the acts of others with respect to corporeal objects. One
is a mere condition of fact, a mere physical holding of or physical
control over the thing without any other element whatever. The Roman
jurists called this natural possession. We call it custody. Writers on
analytical jurisprudence regard it as an element of possession. But
this natural possession is something that may exist independently of
law or of the state, as in the so-called _pedis possessio_ of American
mining law, where, before law or state authority had been extended to
the public domain in the mining country, the miners recognized the
claim of one who was actually digging to dig without molestation at
that spot. The mere having of an object in one's actual grasp gives an
advantage. But it may be only an advantage depending on one's strength
or on recognition of and resp