[10th Paragraph]
The particular form of bad conscience that manifests itself in the kind of eloquence with which that shallowness plumes itself can be noted here; specifically, that where it is most unspiritual, it speaks most of the spirit, where it talks most deadly and leathery, the word life and introducing into life, where it expresses the greatest egoism of empty pride, it most uses the word people. The peculiar mark it bears on its forehead, however, is hatred of the law. That right and ethical life, and the actual world of the right and the ethical, are grasped through thought, and through thought give themselves the form of rationality, namely universality and determinacy—this, the law, is what that feeling which reserves for itself its own pleasure, that conscience which places right in subjective conviction, rightly regards as most hostile. The form of right as a duty and as a law is felt by it as a dead, cold letter and as a fetter; for in it, it does not recognize itself, and thus does not find itself free therein, because the law is the reason of the matter, and this does not allow feeling to warm itself at its own particularity. The law is therefore, as noted somewhere in the course of this textbook6), primarily the Shibboleth by which the false brothers and friends of the so-called people are separated.
6) *The mentioned book [by Haller] is of an original kind due to the character specified. The author’s resentment could have something noble in itself, as it was ignited by the false theories previously mentioned, originating primarily from Rousseau, and mainly by their attempted realization. But Mr. v. Haller has, in order to save himself, thrown himself into an opposite that is a complete lack of thought, and in which there can therefore be no talk of content—namely into the bitterest hatred against all laws, legislation, all formally and legally determined right. Hatred of law, of legally determined right, is the Shibboleth by which fanaticism, shallowness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions reveal themselves and infallibly make known what they are, regardless of the clothes they might put on. … [further excerpts from Haller’s work follow, criticizing his notion that the “might of the stronger” is God’s eternal order and his rejection of codified law and state duties as “unnatural”]. … It is the hardest thing that can happen to a man: to have strayed so far from thinking and rationality, from reverence for laws, and from the cognition of how infinitely important, divine it is that the duties of the state and the rights of citizens, as well as the rights of the state and the duties of citizens, are legally determined, that the absurd is substituted for the word of God.
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