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CHAPTER III
THE STRUGGLE FOR HIS RIGHTS A DUTY OF
THE PERSON WHOSE RIGHTS HAVE BEEN
VIOLATED, TO HIMSELF
HE struggle for his right is a duty of the person whose rights have been violated, to himself.
The preservation of existence is the highest law of the whole living creation. It manifests itself in every creature in the instinct of self-preservation. Now man is not concerned only with his physical life but with his moral existence. But the condition of this moral existence is right, in the law. In the law, man possesses and defends the moral condition of his existence—without law he sinks to the level of the beast,[1] just as the Romans very logically, from the stand-
- ↑ In the novel, Michel Kohlhaas, by Heinrich von Kleist, to which I shall return again, the writer makes his hero say: “Better be a dog, if I am to be trodden under foot, than a man.”
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