Complete morality contains what honor and law can only command and forbid. Fulfilled honor prohibits of itself what the law lays under penalty, but honor does not assure everything which morality demands, nor does the criminal law secure everything that morality and honor decree. From this series we may immediately conclude that honor corresponds, as a social requisite, to the needs of a somewhat contracted circle, between those of the largest civic group, which coerces its members by penal law, and those of purely personal life, which finds its norms only in the autonomy of the individual. In the executive action of these three sorts of law the intermediate position of honor also shows itself. While civic law employs physical force as its sanction, while personal morality has no other recourse than the approval or disapproval of conscience, the laws of honor are guarded by penalties which have neither the pure externality of the former nor the pure subjectivity of the latter. This peculiar intermediary position of honor points to the perception which arises from the most general observation of the workings of honor, viz.: that honor is originally a class standard (Standesehre); i.e., an appropriate life-form of smaller circles contained within a larger whole. By the demands upon its members contained in the group standard of honor the group preserves its unified character and its distinctness from the other groups within the same inclusive association. That which we think of as honor in a larger sense than this, as human honor in general, or, otherwise expressed, as purely individual honor, is an abstract idea made possible by effacing the boundaries of the class (Stand). It is, indeed, impossible to name any single procedure which assails human honor as such, i.e., every human being’s sense of honor without exception. It is a matter of honor with the ascetic to let himself be spit upon; with the girls of a certain African tribe to have as many sexual relations as possible. Accordingly the essential thing is the specific idea of honor in narrow groups—family honor, officers’ honor, mercantile honor, yes, even the “honor among thieves.” Since the individual belongs to various groups, the individual
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