shamagmatism

What struck me as important in this writing was how Holmes established an idea that is confined to things we can possibly understand. His first sentence, “When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession” (Holmes 145) establishes this outlook. Unfortunately however, I understand that this is only one outlook on the topic of law. Laws that we did not create, such as gravity or electromagnetism, are the interesting things to me. I am a reasonable person and have been around long enough to understand the extent to which I need to understand manifested law. The things that I want to understand, because of the fact that I don’t understand them, are the things that for some reason attract me. With that being said, I think an important line is stated as, “Everywhere the basis of principle is tradition, to such an extent that we even are in danger of making the role of history more important then it really is” (Holmes 161). If this is true, this idea may be analogous to the entire theme of this writing. Understanding the things we already understand may misguide us into the inquiry of things that are no longer important. The things that are important, it seems, are the things that we have yet to understand. However, it can be argued that understanding the things we have not yet understood requires inquiry into history, the past, and into the mistakes and successes of the previous attempts.