The terms legal fact and legal consequence have been misunderstood and incorrectly applied particularly in the jurisprudential construction of subjective rights and duties, and more especially in private law. It is, for instance, not unusual that what ultimately amounts to unscientific, even superstitious, misconceptions of reality serve as explanations to natural events of different kinds. One very illustrative and frequent example of this, according to Hägerström, is our propensity to talk of natural and personal powers as if they were natural and self-evident powers.This despite the fact that these so-called powers, which are understood as being potential or actual, cannot withstand critical scrutiny, as the ordinary faulty conception of power contravenes spatiotemporal causality.227This in turn has resulted in the various animistic and metaphysical (and more important, scientific) misconceptions of reality that are so prevalent in all walks of modern life.228 Notwithstanding the fact that the modern worldview has theoretically rejected such supernatural and unscientific explanations, it is a fact that law, morality, and religion are still under the rule of a world-view closely related to that of the magical.229 To Hägerström, law makes a very illustrative example of such animistic and superstitious views, and he provides good examples of the close affinity that exists between law and outright superstition.This incidentally, has given rise to the anecdote of Hägerström wandering about in Uppsala like a modern-day Socrates questioning the traditional beliefs of his fellow citizens, by asking, for example, whether or not an apple actually was an apple, and whether or not it was at all possible to buy and own p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 5 450 5. 2 legal facts and consequence s in the construct ion of subj ect ive rights 227 Hägerström,“Kraftvorstellungen,” pp. 63-65. Cf., e.g., Hägerström,“Naturrätt?,” pp. 321-323; Obligationsbegriff 1, passim; Obligationsbegriff 2, passim;“Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 585-588, 604-622, and 629-630; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 29-33, 5376, and 85-87. 228 Hägerström, Selbstdarstellungen, pp. 47-48; “Kraftvorstellungen,” pp. 71-84. 229 Hägerström, “Kraftvorstellungen,” pp. 82-84.
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