Even if his pessimism doesn’t seem wholly warranted, a sense of foreboding surely is, which is why his warnings have to be taken seriously. Mr. Phillips writes that the inventors and marketers of the new financial instruments didn’t entirely understand them. An executive of Fidelity International says a panicky feeling has set in on Wall Street because no one knows where the risks really are. The finance minister of France observes that investments may have reached such a level of complexity that no one can assess them. And Charles R. Morris, in his own gloomy book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” reports that even Citigroup’s chief financial officer “did not know how to value his holdings.

Visit China today and you find the most dynamic capitalist nation in the world. In 2005, it had the distinction of being the world’s fastest-growing major economy. China is the manufacturing hub of the globe. It’s is also moving quickly into the highest of high technologies. It already graduates more computer engineers every year than the United States. Its cities are booming.

This paradox is most striking in the thought of the father of modern empirical naturalism, Thomas Hobbes. When analyzing human nature Hobbes is intent upon reducing man’s uniqueness to a minimum; reason merely extends the natural will to live. Human history begins nevertheless with an act of decision. For Hobbes, this decision, the social contract, is intended to avoid anarchy by the creation of an absolute government, to the authority of which all social decisions are submitted.

Nature and reason are the two gods of modern man. The modern man is so certain about his essential virtue because he is so mistaken about his stature. He tries to interpret himself in terms of natural causality or in terms of his unique rationality; but he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason.

We must never take for granted the fact that we have these opportunities to educate ourselves, to work for equality, and to create value in our business endeavors. We can’t forget there are places in the world where the human spirit is quashed, where learning is suppressed and minds are deliberately kept in submission.

In 1770 John Adams of Braintree, Massachusetts, was called a traitor to the patriot cause. Yet thirty-one years later he became the second President of the United States. Adams was the lawyer for the defense of the hated British troops charged with the Boston Massacre. But there was a principle involved, entirely consistent with the goals for which the patriots, including Adams, were struggling.

A kindly and scholarly lawyer and jurist, Wythe had been Jefferson’s law instructor and then his associate in the Revolutionary cause and in many of the political affairs of Virginia. Born in 1726, he had little formal schooling himself. But with his mother’s help and by continuous reading and self-education, he so mastered Latin, Greek, mathematics, the classics, moral philosophy, and the natural sciences that eventually he was acknowledged to be the most learned lawyer in Virginia, if not the colonies.

Law based solely upon the need to preserve the social status quo would scarcely have been sufficient for a people engaged in creating a new society. The law had to shift its goal from one of giving to each his due to one of promoting a maximum of individual self-assertion. Unlike the law on the other side of the Atlantic, American law became expansive rather than defensive in nature, favoring change more than stability.

The size of the country and the abundance of its natural resources made impossible the importation of the common law exactly as it had been developed in England. Measured by English standards, America had superabundant land, timber, and mineral wealth. American law had to serve the primary need of the new society-to master the vast land areas of the American continent. The decisive facts upon which the law had to be based were the seemingly limitless expanses of land and the wealth and variety of natural resources.