inevitable in all law with the need men felt of having a fixed,
unchangeable, authoritative rule. The scholastic philosophy did
notable service in these respects and, I venture to think, left as a
permanent contribution to legal science the method of insuring
certainty by logical development of the content of authoritatively
defined conceptions.

On the breakdown of the feudal social organization, the rise of
commerce and the era of discovery, colonization and exploitation of
the natural resources of new continents, together with the rise of
nations in place of loose congeries of vassal-held territories, called
for a national law unified within the national domain. Starkey
proposed codification to Henry VIII and Dumoulin urged harmonizing and
unifying of French customary law with eventual codification. The
Protestant jurist-theologians of the sixteenth century found a
philosophical basis for satisfying these desires of the time in the
divinely ordained state and in a natural law divorced from theology
and resting solely upon reason, reflecting the boundless faith in
reason which came in with the Renaissance. Thus each national jurist
might work out his own interpretation of natural law by dint of his
own reason, as each Christian might interpret the word of God for
himself as his own reason and conscience showed the way. On the other
hand, the Catholic jurists of the Counter-Reformation found a
philosophical basis for satisfying these same desires in a conception
of natural law as a system of limitations on human action expressing
the nature of man, that is, the ideal of man as a rational creature,
and of positive law as an ideal system expressing the nature of a
unified state. For the moment these ideas were put at the service of a
growing royal authority and bore fruit in the Byzantine theory of
sovereignty which became classical in public law. In private law they
soon took quite another turn. For a new period of growth, demanded by
the expansion of society and the breaking over the bonds of authority,
was at hand to make new and wholly different demands upon philosophy.

Glossators and commentators had made or shaped the law out of Roman
materials for a static, locally self-sufficient, other-worldly
society, revering authority because authority had saved it from what
it feared, regarding chiefly the security of social institutions and
negligent of the individual life because in its polity the individual
lived his