highest life in the life of another whose greatness was the
greatness of those who served him. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries jurists were required to make or shape a law out of these
medievalized Roman materials to satisfy the wants of an active and
shifting, locally interdependent, this-worldly society, impatient of
authority because authority stood in the way of what it desired, and
jealously individualist, since it took free individual self-assertion
to be the highest good. In England the strict law made for feudal
England out of Germanic materials, sometimes superficially Romanized,
was likewise to be made over to do the work of administering justice
to a new world. A period of legal development resulted which is
strikingly analogous to the classical period of Roman law. Once more
philosophy took the helm. Once more there was an infusion into law of
ideas from without the law. Once more law and morals were identified
in juristic thinking. Once more men held as a living tenet that all
positive law was declaratory of natural law and got its real authority
from the rules of natural law which it declared. Once more juridical
idealism led the jurist to survey every corner of the actual law,
measuring its rules by reason and shaping, extending, restricting or
building anew in order that the actual legal edifice might be a
faithful copy of the ideal.

But the theory of natural law, devised for a society organized on the
basis of kinship and developed for a society organized on the basis of
relations, did not suffice for a society which conceived of itself as
an aggregate of individuals and was reorganizing on the basis of
competitive self-assertion. Again the convenient ambiguity of _ius_,
which could mean not only right and law but "a right," was pressed
into service and _ius naturale_ gave us natural rights. The ultimate
thing was not natural law as before, not merely principles of eternal
validity, but natural rights, certain qualities inherent in man and
demonstrated by reason, which natural law exists to secure and to
which positive law ought to give effect. Later these natural rights
came to be the bane of juristic thinking. Yet they achieved great
things in their day. Under the influence of this theory jurists worked
out a scheme of "legal rights" that effectively secures almost the
whole field of individual interests of personality and individual
interests of substance. It put a scientific foundation