The Doctrine of Stare Decisis. bleness of character with which he is en dued by his Maker. It makes of him a base tool, and in following submissively after the dogmas of others, without exerting to the extent of our ability the noble pow ers which God has given us to guide us in our judgments, what are we but the blind followers and slaves of others? True, we should respect great authorities and honor them; but only when we find them to be right. Our first duty is to make this inquiry. And in so doing we detract no reverence from the great teachers. We only establish our own proper dignity. "Disciples owe to masters only a temporary belief and suspen sion of judgment, until they are thoroughly instructed; not absolute resignation and perpetual servitude of mind. Let great au thors have their due, but so as not to rob time, which is the author of authors and the parent of truth." These words are taken from the great Verulam, who, however, did not always himself pay regard to his canon of judgment. A great philosopher may lay down wise rules and yet not follow them out very clearly in practice. Now it is easy to see the bad effects of the " perpetual servitude of mind." It stops the work of improvement. The errors of one great man may continue until another great man arises : and thus we shall constantly have an interregnum of consecrated error. It is, then, not only safest and best, but it is the duty of every rational thinker to dis regard names in his various inquiries, until the truth of things is established. Truth should be our first and only object. And when a man, however humble, has once clearly discovered the truth, he should have the boldness to declare it, if it is worth communicating, against the greatest authori ty. This sentiment of Juvenal, — " plurima sunt quae Non audent homines pertusa dicere laena," may answer very well as a maxim of worldly policy; but in researches after truth, in inquiries touching matters that
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effect our, welfare or the interest of our country, it should certainly have no weight. Plato has laid down on this point a much nobler precept, " One should dare speak the truth, when discoursing on truth. " A blind obedience to great authorities is, in short, destructive alike of all manliness of thought and boldness of mental energy. Nothing so destroys a spirit of indepen dence and cripples the power of the mind, as an habitual reliance on the efforts of oth ers. Let us therefore not exalt unduly the value of precedents or conclude that what ever is ancestral must therefore be admira ble. It is true that the judgments of wise men formed in times " whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary " should not be set aside simply because they are old. Great weight is there in the words of Edmund Burke, whose eloquence was rivaled by his sagacity. " Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years." But it is a cheering and valuable reflection which is readily suggested to us by a view of the in tellectual history of man, that nature has evidently designed us to be the ministers of our own improvement, giving us a spirit which never can acquiesce in its present at tainments. If the conviction that we and all that surrounds us have been so largely determined by the past sometimes weighs on us with tyrannous power, the thought that we in our turn are shaping the destinies of future generations becomes a moral motive of almost irresistible force, compelling us to high resolve and dutiful action. The great ness of the past chiefly consists, not in its being fruit, but in its being germ. Plutarch warns young men that it is well to go for a light to another man's fire, but by no rneans to tarry by it instead of kindling a torch of their own; and says that when Cicero as a young man visited the oracle at Delphi, the advice given him was to make his own genius, not the opinion of others, the guide
