Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
blow dealt it strikes me, for I am present in it. Property is but the periphery of my person extended to things.
This connection of the law with the person invests all rights, no matter what their nature, with that incommensurable value which, in opposition to their purely material value, I call ideal value. From it springs that devotedness and energy in the assertion of legal right which I have described above. This ideal conception of the law is not a privilege of characters highly endowed by nature; but it is as accessible to the coarsest as to the most cultured, to the richest as to the poorest, to savage and to civilized nations; and, just here, we discover so clearly how firmly rooted in the innermost nature of the law this idealism is—it is nothing but the healthfulness of the feeling of legal right. The law which, on the one hand, seems to relegate man exclusively to the low region of egotism and interest, lifts him, on the other hand, to an ideal height, in which he forgets all policy, all calculation, that measure of
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