astern
controversy, which it generally acquiesced in without interest and
without resistance. Meanwhile, one department of inquiry, difficult
enough for the most laborious, deep enough for the most subtle,
delicate enough for the most refined, had never lost its attractions
for the educated classes of the Western provinces. To the cultivated
citizen of Africa, of Spain, of Gaul and of Northern Italy, it was
jurisprudence, and jurisprudence only, which stood in the place of
poetry and history, of philosophy and science. So far then from there
being anything mysterious in the palpably legal complexion of the
earliest efforts of Western thought it would rather be astonishing if
it had assumed any other hue. I can only express my surprise at the
scantiness of the attention which has been given to the difference
between Western ideas and Eastern, between Western theology and
Eastern, caused by the presence of a new ingredient. It is precisely
because the influence of jurisprudence begins to be powerful that the
foundation of Constantinople and the subsequent separation of the
Western Empire from the Eastern, are epochs in philosophical history.
But continental thinkers are doubtless less capable of appreciating
the importance of this crisis by the very intimacy with which notions
derived from Roman Law are mingled up with every-day ideas.
Englishmen, on the other hand, are blind to it through the monstrous
ignorance to which they condemn themselves of the most plentiful
source of the stream of modern knowledge, of the one intellectual
result of the Roman civilisation. At the same time, an Englishman, who
will be at the pains to familiarise himself with the classical Roman
law, is perhaps, from the very slightness of the interest which his
countrymen have hitherto taken in the subject, a better judge than a
Frenchman or a German of the value of the assertions I have ventured
to make. Anybody who knows what Roman jurisprudence is, as actually
practised by the Romans, and who will observe in what characteristics
the earliest Western theology and philosophy differ from the phases of
thought which preceded them, may be safely left to pronounce what was
the new element which had begun to pervade and govern speculation.

The part of Roman law which has had most extensive influence on
foreign subjects of inquiry has been the law of Obligation, or what
comes nearly to the same thing, of Contract and Delict. The Romans
themselves wer