Urban rationalism turned, as in the case of the Sophists and the Stoics, to busy itself with the “law of nature,” from its foundation by Oldendorp and Bodinus to its destruction by Hegel. In England the great Coke successfully defended Germanic self-developing practical law against the last attempts of the Tudors to introduce Pandect law. But on the Continent the systems of the learned evolved in _Roman_ forms right down to the state codes of Germany and the schemes of the _Ancien Régime_ in France on which the Code Napoléon was based. And therefore Blackstone’s _Commentaries on the Laws of England_ (1765) is the one purely Germanic Code, and it appeared when the Faustian Culture had already reached the threshold of its Civilization. VIII With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law-histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing--standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have accomplished before us. What has “Roman” law been for us hitherto? What has it spoilt? What can it be for us in the future? All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician’s text with Magian under-sense, but _a piece of preserved history_. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him. For Gothic man--so far as he reflected about himself at all--the question was not whether he should look for linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for them. He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the present. On the spiritual side the past which presented itself to him was ancient Israel; on the mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics he saw all about him. What was revered was revered not because it was great, but because it was old and distant. If these men had known Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the language of our Culture would have developed differently.