The Struggle for Law
at the contemplation of the higher display of human power which sculpture and poetry have illustrated. The highest problem of art and literature is man’s defense of an idea, be that idea law, fatherland, faith, or truth. But this entering the lists for an idea is always a struggle.
It is not, however, aesthetics, but ethics, which has to tell us what is in harmony with, and what contradicts, the idea of law. But ethics, far from rejecting the struggle for law, enjoins it as a duty. The element of strife and of struggle which Herbart would eliminate from the idea of the law is an integral part of it, and has been from the first—struggle is the eternal labor of the law. The sentence: “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,” is on a level with this other: “By struggling shalt thou obtain thy rights.” From the moment that the law gives up its readiness to fight, it gives itself up; for the saying of the poet, that only he deserves liberty and life who has to conquer them for himself every day, is true of law also.
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