As however these legal authorities have concentrated their attention exclusively upon legal duties, and do not touch upon the problem as to the way in which the individual will has to rule in its legal sphere, Ihering has interpreted them as meaning that they considered the true and highest good, and the most intrinsic and final end, towards which the legal code strives, to be the exercise of the will as will, the joy of the individual in his volitional activity; “the final end of all law is, for them, willing” (pp. 320, 325); “the end of law (according to them) consists once for all in the power of the will, in its supremacy” (p. 326). One can well understand how he comes to condemn a theory so interpreted (p. 327), and even that he succeeds in making it appear ridiculous. “According to this view,” he says, (p. 320) “all private right is nothing less than an arena in which the will moves and exercises itself; the will is the organ by which the individual enjoys his right, the profit obtained from legal right consists in feeling the joy and glory of power, in the satisfaction of having realized an act of will, e.g. of having effected a mortgage, transferred a title, and so proved oneself to be a legal personality. What a poor thing would the will be if the bare and low regions of law were the proper “sphere of its activity!”
Certainly the heaviest charges of absurdity and ridiculousness would be well deserved if those scholars who regard the _immediate_ aim of law as consisting in a limitation of the spheres at the disposal of the will had intended in so doing to disavow all regard for the _final ethical end_, i.e. the advancement of the highest practical good. There is, however, absolutely nothing to justify this insinuation, and therefore one could perhaps with more right smile at the zeal of an attack which is really levelled merely against windmills. Moreover, what Ihering proposes to set in its place is certainly a bad substitute. For, in regarding the sphere ascribed by the legal authority to the individual simply as a sphere consigned to their egoism (a view which, as the author of _Der Zweck im Recht_, he perhaps no longer holds), he is thus led to his definition: “Law (Recht) is legal security for enjoyment,” whereas he would have been more correct in saying: “Law is legal security for the undisturbed disposal of individual power in the advancement of the highest good.” Is then injustice something which exhausts bad conduct? By no means; legal duties have limits; duty in general governs all our actions, and this our popular religion expressly emphasizes, as, for instance, when it asserts that for every idle word the individual must render an account.