ean to antiquity what
it means to us who are under the influence of the idea of evolution.
To the Greek, it has been said, the natural apple was not the wild one
from which our cultivated apple has been grown, but rather the golden
apple of the Hesperides. The "natural" object was that which
expressed most completely the idea of the thing. It was the perfect
object. Hence the natural law was that which expressed perfectly the
idea of law and a rule of natural law was one which expressed
perfectly the idea of law applied to the subject in question; the one
which gave to that subject its perfect development. For legal purposes
reality was to be found in this ideal, perfect, natural law, and its
organ was juristic reason. Legislation and the edict, so far as they
had any more than a positive foundation of political authority, were
but imperfect and ephemeral copies of this jural reality. Thus the
jurists came to the doctrine of the _ratio legis_, the principle of
natural law behind the legal rule, which has been so fruitful both of
practical good and of theoretical confusion in interpretation. Thus
also they came to the doctrine of reasoning from the analogy of all
legal rules, whether traditional or legislative, since all, so far as
they had jural reality, had it because and to the extent that they
embodied or realized a principle of natural law.

Natural law was a philosophical theory for a period of growth. It
arose to meet the exigencies of the stage of equity and natural law,
one of the great creative periods of legal history. Yet, as we have
seen, even the most rapid growth does not permit the lawyer to ignore
the demand for stability. The theory of natural law was worked out as
a means of growth, as a means of making a law of the world on the
basis of the old strict law of the Roman city. But it was worked out
also as a means of directing and organizing the growth of law so as to
maintain the general security. It was the task of the jurists to build
and shape the law on the basis of the old local materials so as to
make it an instrument for satisfying the wants of a whole world while
at the same time insuring uniformity and predicability. They did this
by applying a new but known technique to the old materials. The
technique was one of legal reason; but it was a legal reason
identified with natural reason and worked out and applied under the
influence of a philosophical ideal. The conception of natural law as
somet