But the difficulties contained in that concept had several times been observed in antiquity. In a dialogue between Alcibiades and Pericles, preserved in the _Memorabilia,_ it is asked if all laws be laws, or only those that are just; and it is shown that it does not suffice that a law should be a law, in order to ensure its observance.[28] No true solution, however, was reached in this, as in many questions discussed at this period by Greek philosophy. The _Crito_ is rather a stupendous work of art than a philosophical thesis, for it shows to the life the state of soul of Socrates, and the importance that he attributed to the laws and to the social order: the reason alleged for obedience to them, being placed in the fact that we have tacitly or explicitly agreed to remain within the boundaries of a given state, has in it something of the sophistical. Even in antiquity was seen the necessity of tempering the rigidity of laws by means of the equable, το ἐπιεικέç, which Aristotle defined as the correction of the law where it sins through its character of generality (ἐπανόρθωμα νόμου ᾗ ἐλλείπει διὰ τὸ καθόλου).[29] But it was not possible to escape from empiricism by means of the concept of equity. The law sins, not once, but always, through abstractness, or better, it never sins at all, because its function resides precisely in that abstractness.--In modern times Diderot felt and expressed all the gravity of the conflicts that arise, alike from the observance and from the inobservance of the law, and he expresses this in his _Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants sur le danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois. "Mon père_ (remarks one of the sons at the end of the dialogue), _c'est qu'à la rigueur il n'y a pas de lois pour le sage.... Parlez plus bas.... Toutes étant sujettes à des exceptions, c'est à lui qu'il appartient de juger des cas où il faut s'y soumettre ou s'en affranchir.--Je ne serais pas trop fâché_ (concludes the father), _qu'il y eût dans la ville un ou deux citoyens, comme toi; mais je n'y habiterais pas, s'ils pensaient tous de même._"[30] [Sidenote: _Romanticism._] The attitude of rebellion to the laws showed itself in German thought and literature in the preromanticism of the _Sturm und Drang_ (for instance in the _Räuber_ of Schiller), and in Romanticism properly so called, when among others appeared the theories that limited the State, such as those of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and theories of sexual relations, such as those of Friedrich Schlegel. In the _Lucinde_ is displayed great horror for _bourgeois_ customs and for every sort of constraint, sexual relations being advocated with woman, family, love and fidelity, but without matrimony. [Sidenote: _Jacobi._]