We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood.  The weak have no essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak.  The world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength.  And the real justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are altogether strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect wherein he is seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength though it may be only a little peculiar strength or an undeveloped potentiality.  The unconverted man uses his strength egotistically, emphasizes himself harshly against the man who is weak where he is strong, and hates and conceals his own weakness.  The Believer, in the measure of his belief, respects and seeks to understand the different strength of others and to use his own distinctive power with and not against his fellow men, in the common service of that synthesis to which each one of them is ultimately as necessary as he.

3.25.  Of love and justice.

Now here the friend who has read the first draft of this book falls into something like a dispute with me.  She does not, I think, like this dismissal of Justice from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.

“Justice,” she asserts, “is an instinctive craving very nearly akin to the physical craving for equilibrium.  Its social importance corresponds.  It seeks to keep the individual’s claims in such a position as to conflict as little as possible with those of others.  Justice is the root instinct of all social feeling, of all feeling which does not take account of whether we like or dislike individuals, it is the feeling of an orderly position of our Ego towards others, merely considered as others, and of all the Egos merely as Egos towards each other.  Love cannot be felt towards others as others.  Love is the expression of individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some cases implies its absolute negation in others.  Hence Love can never be the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences or aversions.  And here I may say that all application of the word love to unknown, distant creatures, to mere others, is a perversion and a wasting of the word love, which, taking its origin in sexual and parental preference, always implies a preference of one object to the other.  To love everybody is simply not to love at all.  And it is just because of the passionate preference instinctively felt for some individuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding and self-respecting passion of justice.”