It has been used to break down the authority of outworn
tradition, to bend authoritatively imposed rules that ad-
mitted of no change to new uses which changed profoundly
their practical effect, to bring new elements into the law
from without and make new bodies of law from these new
materials, to organize and systematize existing legal materials
and to fortify established rules and institutions when periods
of growth were succeeded by periods of stability and of
merely formal reconstruction. Such have been its actual
achievements. Yet all the while its professed aim has been
much more ambitious. It has sought to give us a complete and
final picture of social control. It has sought to lay down a
moral and legal and political chart for all time. It has had
faith that it could find the everlasting, unchangeable legal
reality in which we might rest, and could enable us to estab-
lish a perfect law by which human relations might be or-
dered forever without uncertainty and freed from need of
change. Nor may we scoff at this ambitious aim and this lofty
faith. They have been not the least factors in the power of
legal philosophy to do the less ambitious things which in
their aggregate are the bone and sinew of legal achievement.
For the attempt at the larger program has led philosophy of
law incidentally to do the things that were immediately and
practically serviceable, and the doing of these latter, as it
were sub specie aeternitatis, has given enduring worth to
what seemed but by-products of philosophical inquiry.

Two needs have determined philosophical thinking about
law. On the one hand, the paramount social interest in the
general security, which as an interest in peace and order dic-
tated the very beginnings of law, has led men to seek some
fixed basis of a certain ordering of human action which
should restrain magisterial as well as individual willfulness
and assure a firm and stable social order. On the other hand,
the pressure of less immediate social interests, and the need

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