10 - Emerson and Holmes: Serene Skeptics

Summary

Like other contributors to this volume, Catharine Peirce Wells takes note of what she calls the “big finish” of The Path of the Law, which concludes with the evocation of “an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law.” She argues (in Chapter 9 of this volume) that this powerful statement seems to dissolve the tensions suggested by standard-form positivism, with its sharp separation between law and morals and thus, at the very least, contributes to the difficulty in locating Holmes along any single intellectual spectrum.

Wells's own strategy in overcoming the “seeming inconsistencies” of Holmes's thought is to look at him through what might be called a Jamesian filter. That is, she asks us to interpret Holmes as if he were, in some measure, “really” William James, a contemporary who was also, in fact, a close associate of Holmes during his youth and young adulthood in Boston. We are invited to imagine Holmes and James “drinking whisky, smoking cigars, and discussing philosophy well into the early morning.” She argues that such experiences may well account for “a lifelong resonance between the views” of Holmes and James. Appropriately enough, given Jamesian pragmatism, Wells says that “this way of reading Holmes seems to work” by “reconcil[ing] some of the more obvious contradictions” within Holmes's thought, including the relatively few pages of The Path of the Law itself, and “makes sense of the inspirational passage at the end of the essay.”