o predict the future. In its opinion, the
lessons of experience teach us only to repeat old errors, and its whole
philosophy consists in perpetually retracing the tracks of antiquity,
instead of going straight ahead forever in the direction in which they
point.

The second school may be called either FATALISTIC or PANTHEISTIC. To
it the movements of empires and the revolutions of humanity are the
manifestations, the incarnations, of the Almighty. The human race,
identified with the divine essence, wheels in a circle of appearances,
informations, and destructions, which necessarily excludes the idea of
absolute truth, and destroys providence and liberty.

Corresponding to these two schools of history, there are two schools
of jurisprudence, similarly opposed, and possessed of the same
peculiarities.

1. The practical and conventional school, to which the law is always a
creation of the legislator, an expression of his will, a privilege
which he condescends to grant,--in short, a gratuitous affirmation to be
regarded as judicious and legitimate, no matter what it declares.

2. The fatalistic and pantheistic school, sometimes called the
historical school, which opposes the despotism of the first, and
maintains that law, like literature and religion, is always the
expression of society,--its manifestation, its form, the external
realization of its mobile spirit and its ever-changing inspirations.

Each of these schools, denying the absolute, rejects thereby all
positive and a priori philosophy.

Now, it is evident that the theories of these two schools, whatever view
we take of them, are utterly unsatisfactory: for, opposed, they form no
dilemma,--that is, if one is false, it does not follow that the other
is true; and, united, they do not constitute the truth, since they
disregard the absolute, without which there is no truth. They are
respectively a THESIS and an ANTITHESIS. There remains to be found,
then, a SYNTHESIS, which, predicating the absolute, justifies the will
of the legislator, explains the variations of the law, annihilates
the theory of the circular movement of humanity, and demonstrates its
progress.

The legists, by the very nature of their studies and in spite of their
obstinate prejudices, have been led irresistibly to suspect that the
absolute in the science of law is not as chimerical as is commonly
supposed; and this suspicion arose from their comparison of the various
relations which legisla