or a time the law was
assimilating what had been taken up during the period of growth and
the task of the jurist was one of ordering, harmonizing and
systematizing rather than of creating. Likewise law had been codifying
on the Continent. Down to the end of the nineteenth century the codes,
whatever their date, in reality speak from the end of the eighteenth
century and with few exceptions are all but copies of the French code
of 1804. Where there were no codes, the hegemony of the historical
school led to a movement back to the law of Justinian which would have
undone much of the progress of the last centuries. The energies of
jurists were turned for a time to analysis, classification and system
as their sole task. Where codes obtained, analytical development and
dogmatic exposition of the text, as a complete and final statement of
the law, was to occupy jurists exclusively for the next hundred years.
We may well think of this time, as it thought of itself, as a period
of maturity of law. The law was taken to be complete and
self-sufficient, without antinomies and without gaps, wanting only
arrangement, logical development of the implications of its several
rules and conceptions, and systematic exposition of its several parts.
Legislation might be needed on occasion in order to get rid of
archaisms which had survived the purgation of the two prior centuries.
For the rest, history and analysis, bringing out the idea behind the
course of development of legal doctrines and unfolding their logical
consequences, were all the apparatus which the jurist required. He
soon affected to ignore philosophy and often relegated it to the
science of legislation, where within narrow limits it might still be
possible to think of creating.

Yet the nineteenth century was no more able to get on without
philosophy of law than were its predecessors. In place of one
universally recognized philosophical method we find four well-marked
types. But they all come to the same final results, are marked by the
same spirit and put the same shackles upon juristic activity. They are
all modes of rationalizing the juristic desires of the time, growing
out of the pressure of the interest in the general security by way of
reaction from a period of growth and in the security of acquisitions
and security of transactions in a time of economic expansion and
industrial enterprise.

In the United States, since the natural law of the eighteenth-century
public