Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/464

444 you had the true historic dogma you had the last word not only in the present but for the immediate future, that I have felt warranted heretofore in throwing out the caution that continuity with the past is only a necessity and not a duty. As soon as a legislature is able to imagine abolishing the requirement of a consideration for a simple contract, it is at perfect liberty to abolish it, if it thinks it wise to do so, without the slightest regard to continuity with the past. That continuity simply limits the possibilities of our imagination, and settles the terms in which we shall be compelled to think.

Historical explanation has two directions or aspects, one practical and the other abstractly scientific. I by no means share that morality which finds in a remoter practice the justification of philosophy and science. I do not believe that we must justify our pursuits by the motive of social well-being. If we have satisfied ourselves that our pursuits are good for society, or at least not bad for it, I think that science, like art, may be pursued for the pleasure of the pursuit and of its fruits, as an end in itself. I somewhat sympathize with the Cambridge mathematician's praise of his theorem, "The best of it all is that it can never by any possibility be made of the slightest use to anybody for anything." I think it one of the glories of man that he does not sow seed, and weave cloth, and produce all the other economic means simply to sustain and multiply other sowers and weavers that they in their turn may multiply, and so ad infinitum, but that on the contrary he devotes a certain part of his economic means to uneconomic ends—ends, too, which he finds in himself and not elsewhere. After the production of food and cloth has gone on a certain time, he stops producing and goes to the play, or he paints a picture, or asks unanswerable questions about the universe, and thus delightfully consumes a part of the world's food and clothing while he idles away the only hours that fully account for themselves.

Thinking in this way, you readily will understand that I do not consider the student of the history of legal doctrine bound to have a practical end in view. It is perfectly proper to regard and study the law simply as a great anthropological document. It is proper to resort to it to discover what ideals of society have been strong enough to reach that final form of expression, or what have been the changes in dominant ideals from century to century. It is proper to study it as an exercise in the morphology and transformation of human ideas. The study pursued for such ends becomes science