n could collect innumerable
statistics; he collects only those which have a bearing on his
subject. The lawyer searches out that part of the legal tradition
which is applicable to his own case. Without some lead
or clue we should lose ourselves in the multifariousness of
transmitted knowledge at our disposal.

To use the past as an instrument for furthering present
purposes implies neither veneration nor disparagement of it.
We neither condemn nor praise the past as a whole; we regard
specific institutions, customs, or ideas, as adequate or
inadequate, as serviceable or disserviceable. In general, it may be
said that the value of any still extant part of the past, be it a
work of art, a habit, a tradition, has very little to do with its
origin. The instinct of eating is still useful though it has a
long history. The works of the Old Masters are not really
great because they are old, nor are the works of contemporaries
either good or bad because they are new. Man himself is
to be estimated no differently, whether he is descended from
the angels or the apes.

If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often
advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would
evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our
remote ancestors.... Such considerations as these have diverse
effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce,
however, disillusionment and sophistication.... This exaltation
of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make
us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment....
We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of
blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided
by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day,
and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.[1]

[Footnote 1: Woodbridge: _The Purpose of History_, p. 72.]

The standards of value of the things we have or do or say,
the approvals or disapprovals we should logically accord them,
are determined not by their history, not by their past, but by
their uses in the living present in which we live. An institution
may have served the purposes of a bygone generation; it
does not follow that it thereby serves our own. The reverse
may similarly be true. For us the specific features of our
social inheritance depend upon the ends or purposes which we
reflectively decide upon and accept. Wh