I. Inner Experience of Language I

Now I ask you how many people think concretely when, let us say, they read of legal proceedings, where there were judges who judged, pronounced judgment; to have judged, to pass sentence—that is, to exercise the judicial function.[^1] Where then is the concrete thinking, or where in the whole world is there any concrete thinking, when the noun. the right or justice is uttered? Just take this very vague abstraction that is in mind when the right, justice, is spoken of, when going to law, the right thing, is expressed in speech. What then is the right really, taken purely from the point of view of language? We have in these days often said that the state should be above all a rights-state—what then is the right considered purely in itself? For most people it remains quite a. shadowy conception, a conception that traffics in the dreariest abstractions. How then is one to arrive at a concrete conception of the right? Let us examine the matter by taking a single case.