The above consideration would also in a way enable one to answer the question as to whether the individual is for the State or the State is for the individual. The controversy seems to be finally unfounded, arisen due to a misconception of the relationship between the individual and the State. To bring the instance of the judiciary once again, the client, the lawyer and the judge form a single cooperative network in the act of bringing about legal and social balance in the jurisdiction of the people concerned, and the unit constitutes a whole, each member forming a necessary contributory part of the whole, and the whole in turn deciding the status of each of such participating parts. The individual exists for the State, because the individual, as a lesser whole, is a constitutive element in the larger whole which is the State. But the State exists for the individual, since the integral wholeness which is the State cannot afford to interfere with the progressive welfare of any of the lesser wholes, insofar as the lesser wholes do not contradict or clash with one another's welfare. So, both the views stand the test of tenability, for they are actually not two viewpoints but two phases of a single point of view, which is the consideration of the entire State as a final whole which is at once inclusive of all the lesser wholes within it forming its inner constituents. This also answers the other question sometimes raised, that both the State and the individual are equally important. The point, however, is that the two are not distinct entities at all.

The administrative and legal issues of life, while they essentially constitute an operation of positive and constructive remedying and equitable healing forces in the organisation, also involve a sometimes unavoidable factor known as punitive justice. Criminal laws engage themselves in this latter aspect of the management of human affairs and in the act known as punishment inflicted by law, the social welfare of the organism is supposed to be ensured. The positive side of legal justice mainly concerns itself with the distribution of property and the question of its ownership in society: the civil rights of the people. Though, even in an act of civil dispensation of justice, an element of punishment may be said to be involved, where, for example, a landed property wrongly appropriated by a person is wrenched out from him and handed over to its rightful owner, based on the principle of equity and welfare of the entire organism of administration; yet, in what is known specially criminal procedure, the punitive aspect puts on an accentuated form as a special kind of pain inflicted on the wrong-doer. It has been held even in a free state or a democracy, where private property is conceded, that all ownership is more a kind of trusteeship and the State can have the right, and has actually the right, to own the entire property under given conditions. In fact, private ownership cannot defy or contravene public welfare or the well-being of the State as a whole. All this means that no one exists for himself alone, but everyone exists for everyone else, also. Here comes into high relief the great spiritual significance of life operating powerfully even in political and judicial administration.

While the manner in which people are entrusted with civil rights or ownership of property has been seen to vary from country to country and from nation to nation, occasioned by local conditions of people and their mentality in the regions concerned, what strikes one's eye ostensibly is the peculiarity in the administration of criminal justice as understood and enacted by the different nations. What kind of punishment is to be meted out to what offence? Can the hand of a person who steals a pencil be amputated as a punishment equitable with the act of offence? Can a nation which forbids smoking, execute a person for committing that act under its jurisdiction? These are extreme cases which kick up basic questions of human justice, but there are others which are involved in the prejudices of the human mind. The steel frames within which are locked up, in India, the characteristics attributed to the classes of people called castes, Varnas, and the functions associated with the Ashramas in the personal life of an individual, as if they are water-tight compartments, iron cages, and not flowing streams joining the river of life, are also examples of the inveterate habit of human prejudice, ignorance and self-esteem, which raise similar questions of a thing called justice behind the rule of social law. In a region monogamy is holy and inviolable, in another polyandry is not only necessary but an act of sacred cooperation and sacrifice. One leader of the people exhorts the nation on the necessity for unconditional non-violence, but another concedes a proviso that violence is justifiable where self-defence is involved, or where one feels a need to protect the lives of people or guard the security of the nation. It needs no mention that the principle of unconditional non-violence considers that even death should be welcome if it follows as a consequence of adherence to non-violence. It follows also from this that one who does not hesitate to embrace death as an inevitable something, whatever be its causative factors, believes perhaps in a deathless immortality of a soul in man, and the welfare hereafter is a greater concern than a welfare in this world. This strange conclusion, though it is likely automatically to follow from a strict observance of unconditional non-violence, cannot be said to be the intention of the leader of a people, who would not deny the possibility of their earthly welfare, all which would only mean that there is a difficulty in reconciling the need for the welfare of people in the world and the necessity, to be adherents of unconditional non-violence.

The processes of the study of the principles of life considered in the above paragraphs should enable one to accept that justice is neither an affirmation nor a negation of life, but a harmony of conditions that should contribute towards the manifestation of circumstances which would enable lower organisations of reality to expand their dimensions and reach up to higher levels which are the souls of the lower ones. Nature does not go to extremes, nor are law and justice extremes of act and behaviour. The meaning of principles that transcend personalities is generally hard for the mind to grasp. As action and reaction are equal and opposite, because they are based on a unitary law of a balance maintained by the forces of Nature, the rights and privileges of people as may be conceded to them, or even the punishments that are supposed to be necessary, cannot, even in a state of enthusiasm, ignore the fundamental principles of righteousness and justice which demand that the spiritual expansion of the individual and the society has to be the criterion behind all judgments, whether rights and properties, privileges and concessions, or punishments and deprivations. It is not for nothing that great thinkers have often felt that only philosophers can be kings, and kings should be philosophers. It was Plata who proclaimed that until this condition of administration is fulfilled, the world is not going to have peace. There must be justice in conceding privileges to a person and justice in meting out punishment. The justice consists not only in the security and welfare ensured to people in general by that dispensation, but it also should, at the same time, ensure the betterment, welfare and progress of the particular individual concerned. Certainly, none but a god can be a just ruler (navishnuh prithivipatih). It has to be borne in mind, again, that the ruler is a principle of integration involving an element of universality in it, and not just a person among many others.

The philosophy and the rationale behind law, justice and jurisprudence would, then, raise the pertinent question: Is man prior to law or is law prior to man? This crucial difference of viewpoint in ultimate matters concerning life is virtually the point of distinction between the Contract Theory of State propounded by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and the Logical Theory of State advocated by philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel, in the West. The Contract Theory holds that man was originally in a state of nature and was ruled by the law of the fish (the larger swallows the smaller) and the law of the jungle (might is right), and this could be naturally the height of any conceivable insecure condition of things. To obviate this sort of perpetual fear endangering the lives of everyone, people are said to have made an agreement among themselves and framed a system of laws and of governance, vesting the power of rule in a single person (monarchy) or a body of persons (oligarchy or bureaucracy) or an assembly of chosen ones by periodical election (democracy). Here the law of the society and of political government is considered as something created by man by mutual consent or agreement to suit the circumstances or conditions under which he lives at any given time. When the circumstances of life change, the laws also can be and have to be changed by mutual understanding and agreement. This would make it appear that there is no such thing as law unless man wills, individually or in a group, that it should be there. It is the creation of human needs and the environment of life. Law does not exist by itself. Man can do or undo it by a majority of votes (since it is unlikely that everyone would always consent to everything unanimously), and sometimes by the exercise of physical force even by a quantitative minority (as it has happened rarely in the history of the world, though unfortunately for the many in the majority) - a situation which implies that man makes laws either by understanding which would be to the satisfaction of many, or by physical force which can be to the sorrow of many. Anyway, according to this point of view of the origin of social law and political government, man is the law-maker, and this is the essence of the Theory of Contract in the science of Politics. From this it would also follow that even the sense of justice can turn out to be a whim oftentimes in the minds of the ruling powers, because it is hard for the dispensation of justice to stand isolated from the operation of law. On a close examination of the subject, the implications of the Contract Theory would seem to be inseparable from the psychological background of society presented by psychoanalysis. Man can be no better because he can make laws, for he can also unmake the very same laws by the same principles of contract which made them, and rational justice would be a word without any substantial meaning.

Though it may be conceded that the Contract Theory is perhaps the truth of the historical origin of human law and government, even this manner of the origin of law must have itself originated from a principle which ought to have a logical priority over the historical accident of the origin of law as propounded by the Contract Theory. Here we come to a subtle philosophical point which would not ordinarily occur to the mind of the common man. Why does there come about a necessity for man to frame a 1aw at a11 by mutual consent? The answer to this question is the logical ground which explains the meaning of law and the necessity for law. The principle which is prior to the human effort of mutual agreement in respect of the framing of the law is itself the central law conditioning and regulating all the laws that man makes subsequently by agreement, election, etc. This is the point which Hegel endeavours to win over Hobbes. It cannot be that man is the sole maker of law; if that had been the case, it would be difficult to understand why at all man felt a need to make law. This need felt by him is the conditioning factor behind man-made laws, and is the main law, the universal law, which regulates temporal laws of the terrestrial State. If law arrests a person and inflicts on him punishment, it is not because of the operation of a man-made law merely (else, man could suddenly change his law and abolish such a thing as legal punishment), but the reaction set up by a wider law which is superior even to the totality of the individuals in society and the members in the State. And what is this law?