n from the formal
over-refinement of the eighteenth century came to identify this with
a primitive simplicity, in juristic hands it was the simplicity of a
rational ideal in place of the cumbrous complexity of legal systems
which had become fixed in their ideas in the stage of the strict
law. Thus Pothier, discussing the Roman categories of contract and
rejecting them for the "natural" principle that man, as a moral
creature, should keep his engagements, declares that the complex and
arbitrary system of Roman law, made up of successive additions at
different times to a narrow primitive stock of legally enforceable
promises, is not adhered to because it is "remote from simplicity."
Again the ideal form of the actual law, which gave content to
natural law, was not an ideal form of historically found principles,
constraining development for all time within historically fixed
bounds, as in the nineteenth century, but an ideal form of the _ratio
legis_--of the reason behind the rule or doctrine or institution
whereby it expressed the nature of the rational human being guided
only by reason and conscience in his relations with similar beings
similarly guided. Attempts to fix the immutable part of law, to lay
out legal charts for all time, belong to the transition to the
maturity of law. The eighteenth-century projects for codification and
the era of codification on the Continent, in which the results of two
centuries of growth were put in systematic form to serve as the basis
of a juristic new start, in form rested upon the theory of natural
law. By a sheer effort of reason the jurist could work out a complete
system of deductions from the nature of man and formulate them in a
perfect code. Go to, let him do so! This was not the mode of thought
of a period of growth but rather of one when growth had been achieved
and the philosophical theory of a law of nature was called upon for a
new kind of service.

At the end of the eighteenth century Lord Kenyon had determined that
"Mansfield's innovations" were not to go on. Indeed some of them were
to be undone. Equity was soon to be systematized by Lord Eldon and to
become "almost as fixed and settled" as the law itself. The absorption
of the law merchant was complete in its main lines although in details
it went on for two decades. Moreover the legislative reform movement
which followed only carried into detail the ideas which had come into
the law in the two preceding centuries. F