ABSTRACT
For the germ of the sense of justice, one must look to the process by which the child at the daybreak of its mental life arrives at the notion of self. The child finds no self-idea ready to hand in its mental furnishings. The child interprets persons in terms of its own subjective experiences because it has no other means of interpreting them. In other words, the ego and the alter are only the same thought with different connotations. The sense of justice is a unique moral spring. It is by no means the same thing as sympathy. Sympathy begins in instinct; the sense of justice has its beginning in the early mental life of the individual developing under conditions of healthy association. In the everyday triumphs of the sense of justice over selfish impulses there is likely to be an admixture of sympathy.
