country; so that, at least in matters of importance, it can never advance
the one without the other. On this rests the power and the advantage of
the hereditary monarchy.
Now as ethics was concerned exclusively with right and wrong doing, and
could accurately point out the limits of his action to whoever was
resolved to do no wrong; politics, on the contrary, the theory of
legislation, is exclusively concerned with the _suffering_ of wrong, and
would never trouble itself with wrong-doing at all if it were not on
account of its ever-necessary correlative, the suffering of wrong, which
it always keeps in view as the enemy it opposes. Indeed, if it were
possible to conceive an infliction of wrong with which no suffering of
wrong on the part of another was connected, the state would, consistently,
by no means prohibit it. And because in ethics the will, the disposition,
is the object of consideration, and the only real thing, the firm will to
do wrong, which is only restrained and rendered ineffective by external
might, and the actually committed wrong, are to it quite the same, and it
condemns him who so wills as unjust at its tribunal. On the other hand,
will and disposition, merely as such, do not concern the state at all, but
only the _deed_ (whether it is merely attempted or carried out), on
account of its correlative, the _suffering_ on the part of another. Thus
for the state the deed, the event, is the only real; the disposition, the
intention, is only investigated so far as the significance of the deed
becomes known through it. Therefore the state will forbid no one to carry
about in his thought murder and poison against another, so long as it
knows certainly that the fear of the sword and the wheel will always
restrain the effects of that will. The state has also by no means to
eradicate the foolish purpose, the inclination to wrong-doing, the wicked
disposition; but merely always to place beside every possible motive for
doing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone in the
inevitable punishment that will ensue. Therefore the criminal code is as
complete a register as possible of motives against every criminal action
that can possibly be imagined—both _in abstracto_, in order to make any
case that occurs an application _in concreto_. Politics or legislation
will therefore for this end borrow from that chapter of ethics which is
the doctrine of right, and which, besides the inner significance of right
and wrong, determines the exact limits between them. Yet it will only do
so for the purpose of making use of its reverse side, and regarding all
the limits which ethics lays down as not to be transgressed, if we are to
avoid _doing_ wrong, from the other side, as the limits which we must not
allow others to transgress if we do not wish to _suffer_ wrong, and from
which we have therefore a _right_ to drive others back. Therefore these
limits are, as much as possible, from the passive side, barricaded by
laws.