n, that all
law emanates from the sovereign, even when the first human beings to
enunciate it are the judges, or you may think that law is the voice of
the Zeitgeist, or what you like. It is all one to my present purpose.
Even if every decision required the sanction of an emperor with despotic
power and a whimsical turn of mind, we should be interested none the
less, still with a view to prediction, in discovering some order, some
rational explanation, and some principle of growth for the rules which
he laid down. In every system there are such explanations and principles
to be found. It is with regard to them that a second fallacy comes in,
which I think it important to expose.

The fallacy to which I refer is the notion that the only force at work
in the development of the law is logic. In the broadest sense, indeed,
that notion would be true. The postulate on which we think about the
universe is that there is a fixed quantitative relation between every
phenomenon and its antecedents and consequents. If there is such a thing
as a phenomenon without these fixed quantitative relations, it is
a miracle. It is outside the law of cause and effect, and as such
transcends our power of thought, or at least is something to or from
which we cannot reason. The condition of our thinking about the universe
is that it is capable of being thought about rationally, or, in other
words, that every part of it is effect and cause in the same sense
in which those parts are with which we are most familiar. So in the
broadest sense it is true that the law is a logical development, like
everything else. The danger of which I speak is not the admission that
the principles governing other phenomena also govern the law, but the
notion that a given system, ours, for instance, can be worked out like
mathematics from some general axioms of conduct. This is the natural
error of the schools, but it is not confined to them. I once heard a
very eminent judge say that he never let a decision go until he was
absolutely sure that it was right. So judicial dissent often is blamed,
as if it meant simply that one side or the other were not doing their
sums right, and if they would take more trouble, agreement inevitably
would come.

This mode of thinking is entirely natural. The training of lawyers is
a training in logic. The processes of analogy, discrimination, and
deduction are those in which they are most at home. The language of
judicial decision is