, the
stone wall of natural rights against which attempts to put an end to
private war in industrial disputes thus far have dashed in vain, and
the notion of a logically derivable super-constitution, of which
actual written constitutions are faint and imperfect reflections,
which has been a clog upon social legislation for a generation, bear
daily witness how thoroughly the philosophical legal thinking of the
past is a force in the administration of justice of the present.
Indeed, the everyday work of the courts was never more completely
shaped by abstract philosophical ideas than in the nineteenth century
when lawyers affected to despise philosophy and jurists believed they
had set up a self-sufficient science of law which stood in no need of
any philosophical apparatus.

In all stages of what may be described fairly as legal development,
philosophy has been a useful servant. But in some it has been a
tyrannous servant, and in all but form a master. It has been used to
break down the authority of outworn tradition, to bend authoritatively
imposed rules that admitted of no change to new uses which changed
profoundly their practical effect, to bring new elements into the
law from without and make new bodies of law from these new materials,
to organize and systematize existing legal materials and to fortify
established rules and institutions when periods of growth were
succeeded by periods of stability and of merely formal reconstruction.
Such have been its actual achievements. Yet all the while its
professed aim has been much more ambitious. It has sought to give us
a complete and final picture of social control. It has sought to lay
down a moral and legal and political chart for all time. It has had
faith that it could find the everlasting, unchangeable legal reality
in which we might rest, and could enable us to establish a perfect law
by which human relations might be ordered forever without uncertainty
and freed from need of change. Nor may we scoff at this ambitious aim
and this lofty faith. They have been not the least factors in the
power of legal philosophy to do the less ambitious things which in
their aggregate are the bone and sinew of legal achievement. For the
attempt at the larger program has led philosophy of law incidentally
to do the things that were immediately and practically serviceable,
and the doing of these latter, as it were _sub specie aeternitatis_,
has given enduring worth to what seemed but b