Translator's Note
could not be traced to legislative acts, Savigny concludes that they came into existence of themselves. Might we not with equal reason, maintain that the man who cannot tell who his great-grandparents were, had none? Here is the cause of this error. The memory of the origin of legal principles is lost in the course of centuries. That which, at first, it was necessary to go in search of, to obtain by struggling for, acquires by long use, a moral authority over minds, so great, and an external fixedness such, that it seems quite natural that it should have been always in force. Such is the mirage which deceived Savigny. His theory has no other basis, and it has been possible only because the earliest time does not tell us how the principles of law came into existence. If, as became the representative of the Historical School, Savigny had framed his theory of the relation of legislation to the law of custom in accordance with history which affords certain information on this question, he would have seen that the opinion then admitted, and to which he attached so
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