Similar in appearance, but so profoundly different in meaning as to leave no doubt as to the great gap which is set between Classical and Western Law, is that inspired and truly Germanic notion of English jurisprudence, the creative power of the judge who “declares” the law. His business is to apply a law which in principle possesses eternal validity. Even the application of the existing body of laws he can regulate, according to the situations disclosed in the course of the case, by means of his “rules” (which have nothing in common with the prætor’s). And if he should conclude in the presence of a particular set of facts that current law is defective in respect of these, he can _fill the gap at once_, and thus in the very middle of a trial create new law, which (if concurred in by the judicial body in the due forms) _becomes thereafter part and parcel of the permanent stock of law_. This is what makes it so completely un-Classical. In the old jurisprudence, the gradual formation of a stock of rules was due purely to the fact that public life followed a substantially homogeneous course throughout a particular period, and produced again and again the same situations to be dealt with--rules _not_ deliberately invested with validity for the future, but more or less recreated again and again as empirical rulings _ad hoc_. The sum of these rulings--not a system, but a collection--came to constitute “the law” as we find it in the later legislation by prætor’s edict, each successive prætor having found it practically convenient to take over substantial portions of his predecessor’s work. Experience, then, means for the ancient lawgiver something different from what it means to us. It means, not the comprehensive outlook over a consistent mass of law that contains implicitly every possible case, associated with practical skill in applying it, but the experimental knowledge that certain jural situations are for ever recurring, so that one can save oneself the trouble of forming new law on every occasion. The genuine Classical form for the slow accretion of legal material is an almost automatic summation of individual νομοί _leges, edicta_, as we find it in the heyday of the Roman prætor. All the so-called legislations of Solon, Charondas, and the Twelve Tables are nothing but occasional collections of such edicts as had been found to be useful. The Law of Gortyn,[70] which is more or less contemporary with the Twelve, is a supplement to some older collection. A newly-founded city would promptly provide itself with such a collection, and in the process a certain amount of dilettantism would slip in (cf. the lawmakers satirized by Aristophanes in _The Birds_). But there is never system in them, still less any intention of establishing enduring law thereby.