Marshall's own outlook upon his task sprang in great part from a profound conviction of calling. He was thoroughly persuaded that he knew the intentions of the framers of the Constitution--the intentions which had been wrought into the instrument itself--and he was equally determined that these intentions should prevail. For this reason he refused to regard his office merely as a judicial tribunal; it was a platform from which to promulgate sound constitutional principles, the very cathedra indeed of constitutional orthodoxy. Not one of the cases which elicited his great opinions but might easily have been decided on comparatively narrow grounds in precisely the same way in which he decided it on broad, general principles, but with the probable result that it would never again have been heard of outside the law courts. To take a timid or obscure way to a merely tentative goal would have been at variance equally with Marshall's belief in his mission and with his instincts as a great debater. Hence he forged his weapon--the obiter dictum--by whose broad strokes was hewn the highroad of a national destiny. Marshall's task naturally was not performed in vacuo: he owed much to the preconceptions of his contemporaries. His invariable quest, as students of his opinions are soon aware, was for the axiomatic, for absolute principles, and in this inquiry he met the intellectual demands of a period whose first minds still owned the sway of the syllogism and still loved what Bacon called the "spacious liberty of generalities." In Marshall's method--as in the older syllogistic logic, whose phraseology begins to sound somewhat strange to twentieth century ears--the essential operation consisted in eliminating the "accidental" or "irrelevant" elements from the "significant" facts of a case, and then recognizing that this particular case had been foreseen and provided for in a general rule of law. Proceeding in this way Marshall was able to build up a body of thought the internal consistency of which, even when it did not convince, yet baffled the only sort of criticism which contemporaries were disposed to apply. Listen, for instance, to the despairing cry of John Randolph of Roanoke: "All wrong," said he of one of Marshall's opinions, "all wrong, but no man in the United States can tell why or wherein."