tionize and transform. For every tendency, one seems to see a counter-tendency; for every rule its antimony. Nothing is stable. Nothing absolute. All is fluid and changeable. There is an endless "becoming." We are back with Heraclitus. That, I mean, is the average or aggregate impression which the picture leaves upon the mind. Doubtless in the last three centuries, some lines, once wavering, have become rigid. We leave more to legislature today, and less perhaps to judges. [1] Yet even now there is change from decade to decade. The glacier still moves.
In this perpetual flux, the problem which confronts the judge is in reality a twofold one: he must first extract from the precedents the underlying principle, the ratio decidendi; he must then determine the path or direction along which the principle is to move and develop, if it is not to wither and die.
The first branch of the problem is the one to which we are accustomed to address ourselves
- ↑ F. C. Montague in "A Sketch of Legal History," Maitland and Montague, p. 161.
