"When Charles Darwin created the philosophy of natural history (for no less title is due to the idea which transformed the knowledge of organic nature from a multitude of particulars into a continuous whole), he was working in the same spirit and towards the same ends as the great publicists who, heeding his field of labour as little as he heeded theirs, had laid in the patient study of historical fact the bases of a solid and rational philosophy of politics and law. Savigny, whom we do not yet know or honour enough, and our own Burke, whom we know and honour, but cannot honour too much, were Darwinians before Darwin. In some measure the same may be said of the great Frenchman Montesquieu, whose unequal but illuminating genius was lost in a generation of formalists."
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University of Cambridge alumniJuristsUniversity of Oxford facultyFellows of the British AcademyLegal scholars
Original Language: English
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'English Opportunities in Historical and Comparative Jurisprudence', an inaugural lecture delivered at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (20 October 1883), quoted in Frederick Pollock, Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses (1890), pp. 41-42
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sir_Frederick_Pollock%2C_3rd_Baronet
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Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet
Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet PC FBA (10 December 1845 – 18 January 1937) was an English jurist best known for his History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, written with F. W. Maitland, and his lifelong correspondence with US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles.
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