Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
as an individual, in the first place, and then of what it is to human society. In this one moment, and in the form of an emotion, of direct feeling, we see more of the real meaning and nature of the law than during long years of undisturbed enjoyment. The man who has not experienced this pain himself, or observed it in others, knows nothing of what law is, even if he had committed the whole corpus juris to memory. Not the intellect, but the feeling, is able to answer this question; and hence language has rightly designated the psychological source of all law as the feeling of legal right (Rechtsgefühl). The consciousness of legal right (Rechtsbewusstsein), legal conviction, are scientific abstractions with which the people are not acquainted. The power of the law lies in feeling, just as does the power of love; and the intellect cannot supply that feeling when it is wanting. But as love frequently does not know itself, and as a single instant suffices to bring it to a full consciousness of itself, so the feeling of legal right uniformly knows not what it is,
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