The Struggle for Law
interest which he had learned to apply everywhere, in order to sacrifice himself purely and simply in the defense of an idea. Law which, in the former region, is prose, becomes, in the struggle for law, poetry in the latter; for the struggle for law, the battle for one’s legal rights, is the poetry of character.
What is it, then, that works this wonder? Not knowledge, not education, but simply the feeling of pain. Pain is the cry of distress, the call for help of imperiled nature. This is true, as I have already remarked, both of the moral and the physical organism; and what the pathology of the human organism is to the physician, the pathology of the feeling of legal right is to the jurist and the philosopher in the sphere of law; or, rather, it is what it should be to them, for it would be wrong to say that it is such to them already. In it, in truth, lies the whole secret of the law. The pain which a person experiences when his legal rights are violated is the spontaneous, instinctive admission, wrung from him by force, of what the law is to him
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