THE MODERN CONCEPTION OF ANIMUS participate. His advice to his clients will measure the sagacity of his conclusions, for, as a general rule, you may be assured that that party will prevail before courts of justice whose cause embodies power rather than logic. Finally, I have once more to impress upon you that among the infinite number of causes which go to make up a resultant of social forces at any given instant of time, none are probably so cogent as the applied sciences. These manifestly largely shape the form which economic competition takes as it varies from decade to decade, and as the form of the competition varies, so must the attributes of the dominant class who make judges, pass statutes, and promulgate the law. Thus dominant classes rise, culminate, and decline, in obedience to the demands of an ever restless nature, and I commend to you to ponder on the imprint which the ebb and flow* of this social tide leaves upon the law. You will find, if I mistake not, that the law is regularly wrenched, more or less violently, from its^logical path, to facilitate the rise of each new species of the competitive man,
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and that it is again dislocated to accelerate that species' fall. Therefore, would you fathom the meaning of the mass of contra dictory precedents with which you have to deal, you should first examine the mech anism which makes each contradiction as inevitable as is the rising and setting of the sun. Starting from these premises I apprehend that you can explain judgments if you can not reconcile them. You can learn to under stand why contradictory decisions have been made precisely as you can understand why in one age the open manor house re placed the castle, and in another the rail way replaced the stage coach. But should you ignore these great fundamental motors of human life, and approach the law as though it were a science apart and selfdeveloping, evolved from internal and im mutable principles of its own which can be reconciled by logic as they expand, I fear that your efforts will resemble those of the mediaeval schoolmen who sought to ex plain the universe by means of the syllogism. Boston, Mass., December, 1906.
