The Philosophy of Law: Private Right, § 13: Every Part of the Soil May Be Originarily Acquired
The first Clause of this Proposition is founded upon the Postulate of the Practical Reason (§ 2); the second is established by the following Proof.
All Men are originally and before any juridical act of Will in rightful possession of the Soil; that is, they have a 1 light to be wherever Nature or Chance has placed them without their will. Possession (possessio), which is to be distinguished from residential settlement (secies) as a voluntary, acquired, and permanent possession, becomes common possession, on account of the connection with each other of all the places on the surface of the Earth as a globe. 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 b 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 ichcal acts, constitutes an original possession in common mo possessions originaria). The conception of an original, common Possession of things is not rived from experience, nor is it dependent on condi-time, as is the case with the imaginary and indemonstrable fiction of a primeval Community of posses- m actual history. Hence it is a practical conception son, involving in itself the only Principle according ich Men may use the place they happen to occupy on the surface of the Earth, in accordance with Laws of Right.