ABSTRACT
One wise leader pointing the way we have had with us many years. The judicial opinions and other writings of Mr. Justice Holmes-practitioner, teacher, historian, philosopher, judge-are a treasury of adult counsels, of balanced judgments as to the relation of the law to other social relations. There you will find a vast knowledge of legal history divorced from slavish veneration for the past, a keen sensitiveness to the needs of today with no irrational revolt against the conceptions of yesterday, a profound respect for the utility of syllogistic reasoning linked with an insistence upon recurrent revisions of premises based on patient studies of new facts and new desires. He has himself abandoned, once and for all, the phantasy of a perfect, consistent, legal uniformity, and has never tried to perpetuate the pretense that there is or can be one. He has put away childish longings for a father-controlled world and it is for that reason, one suspects, that he has steadfastly urged his fellows to do likewise. As a consequence, whatever clear vision of legal realities we have attained in this country in the past twenty-five years is in large measure due to him. No American thinker working his way forward, against his own and other's prejudices, to sane and honest recognition of how the law works and how its workings can be bettered, but Holmes's adult illusionless surveys are an indispensable aid and an inspiration.1
