parties, a limitation of such a kind is in them productive of less serious injury. When therefore such a personal relation arises from the contract as not only to require certain single actions, but, in the strictest sense, to affect the person, and influence the whole manner of his existence; where that which is done or left undone is in the closest dependence on internal sensations; the option of separation should always remain open, and the step itself should not require any extenuating reasons. Thus it is with matrimony.
Where the relation is indeed less intimate, while the personal liberty is still narrowly restricted, I am of opinion that the State should fix a time (the length of which must be determined by the importance of the restriction on the one hand, and on the other by the nature of the pursuit) during which none of the parties should be allowed to detach themselves without mutual consent; but that after its expiration, the contract, unless renewed, should not remain binding, even though the parties, in concluding the engagement, had abandoned the advantage to which such a law would entitle them. For although such a provision might seem to be nothing more than a boon of the law, and not to be enforced more than any other similar privilege, the course we suggest does not debar any one from entering into a lifelong contract, but guards against the possibility of constrained performance of an engagement, when such constraint would be injurious to the individual's highest aims. And indeed it is the less a mere boon in this, that the cases I have quoted, and especially matrimony (as soon as free-will no longer accompanies that relation), differ only in degree from that in which one party surrenders himself as a mere tool into the hands of others, or rather is made a tool by the other to further his designs; and the competence to determine generally in these the boundary between just and unjust constraint, cannot be refused to the State, that is, to
