nanimity as a sublimated revenge.[1] But ordinarily—and practically always in discussing the relation of revenge to justice—he means by revenge what most of us mean, namely, an instinctive tendency, half of the blood and liable to all manner of excess, to strike back when we are injured or affronted. He construes it as one of the expressions of the instinct for power, which, having been temporarily thwarted, seeks to assert itself and feel itself again.[2] Now justice, too, calls for a return for injuries; for, to revert to its earliest and simplest form, when a debtor does not pay his debt, the creditor may exact a substitute for it; the substitute or equivalent has been agreed upon beforehand, and the creditor has a strict right to it—the debtor's property or wife or person may become forfeit. And when injuries become offenses against the community, compensation of some sort comes to be the right of every injured person—that is, under justice also, a second injury follows the first. Revenge and justice may thus seem to come to much the same thing. And yet they are distinct from one another. For under justice, the compensating injury which the injured person inflicts (or has inflicted for him) is in accordance with an understanding in advance, either directly between the parties, or as a matter of general custom and law; measuring eyes have been at work fixing it, there is definition and limitation—there can be then no varying or excess. In other words, justice is an intellectual matter, and hence directly antithetical to the blind rage with which rage does its work. Revenge is for injury simply and is dictated by the sense of injury; just requital is for a wrong (violation of contract or agreement) and is determined by an antecedent idea of what is fair and reasonable. Revenge is personal, justice borders on impersonality. In the one, the blood rushes to our eyes so that we do not see, justice is seeing (or remembering what we saw). So different are they in origin and principle, that revenge may overthrow justice, and justice may set limits to revenge.[3] It becomes a leading function of the state (when such a thing arises) to put an end to the blind raging of revenge, and either to rescue the victims or else to proceed against them itself for the injuries they have
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