For, had the surface of the earth been an infinite plain, men
could have been so dispersed upon it that they might not have come
into any necessary communion with each other, and a state of social
community would not have been a necessary consequence of their
existence upon the earth. Now that possession proper to all men upon
the earth, which is prior to all their particular juridical acts,
constitutes an original possession in common (communio possessionis
originaria). The conception of such an original, common possession
of things is not derived from experience, nor is it dependent on
conditions of time, as is the case with the imaginary and
indemonstrable fiction of a primaeval community of possession in
actual history. Hence it is a practical conception of reason,
involving in itself the only principle according to which men may
use the place they happen to occupy on the surface of the earth, in
accordance with laws of right.
14. The Juridical Act of this Original
Acquisition is Occupancy.
The act of taking possession (apprehensio), being at its beginning
the physical appropriation of a corporeal thing in space (possessionis
physicae), can accord with the law of the external freedom of all,
under no other condition than that of its priority in respect of time.
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