nceptions are
important, not because they typify the necessary results of advancing
thought under all conditions, but because they have exercised
perfectly enormous influence on the intellectual diathesis of the
modern world.

I know nothing more wonderful than the variety of sciences to which
Roman law, Roman Contract-law more particularly, has contributed modes
of thought, courses of reasoning, and a technical language. Of the
subjects which have whetted the intellectual appetite of the moderns,
there is scarcely one, except Physics, which has not been filtered
through Roman jurisprudence. The science of pure Metaphysics had,
indeed, rather a Greek than a Roman parentage, but Politics, Moral
Philosophy, and even Theology, found in Roman law not only a vehicle
of expression, but a nidus in which some of their profoundest
inquiries were nourished into maturity. For the purpose of accounting
for this phenomenon, it is not absolutely necessary to discuss the
mysterious relation between words and ideas, or to explain how it is
that the human mind has never grappled with any subject of thought,
unless it has been provided beforehand with a proper store of language
and with an apparatus of appropriate logical methods. It is enough to
remark, that, when the philosophical interests of the Eastern and
Western worlds were separated, the founders of Western thought
belonged to a society which spoke Latin and reflected in Latin. But in
the Western provinces the only language which retained sufficient
precision for philosophical purposes was the language of Roman law,
which by a singular fortune had preserved nearly all the purity of the
Augustan age, while vernacular Latin was degenerating into a dialect
of portentous barbarism. And if Roman jurisprudence supplied the only
means of exactness in speech, still more emphatically did it furnish
the only means of exactness, subtlety, or depth in thought. For at
least three centuries, philosophy and science were without a home in
the West; and though metaphysics and metaphysical theology were
engrossing the mental energies of multitudes of Roman subjects, the
phraseology employed in these ardent inquiries was exclusively Greek,
and their theatre was the Eastern half of the Empire. Sometimes,
indeed, the conclusions of the Eastern disputants became so important
that every man's assent to them, or dissent from them, had to be
recorded, and then the West was introduced to the results of E