The Roman Law of To-day
writings of Julius Glaser for a refutation of it. But if we were warranted to estimate the law from an aesthetic point of view, I do not know whether, instead of seeing what is beautiful in the law in the exclusion of a struggle, I would not rather place it in the admission of a struggle. I have the courage to express an opinion in direct opposition to Herbart’s, and frankly to confess myself guilty of finding pleasure in strife. I of course do not here mean a mere war of words, or a contest about nothing. I mean that sublime struggle in which the man stakes his own person and all he has for his own rights or the rights of his country. The person who blames the love of struggle in this sense may wipe out all our literature and all our art from the Iliad of Homer and the sculpture of the Greeks to our own day. There is scarcely any subject which has had so much attraction for the pen of the poet and the brush of the painter as strife and war; and we would have to go far to find the person whose aesthetic taste is more displeased than pleased
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