to the broader aspects of New England culture.
Like his father, Holmes declared himself an agnostic but frequently referred to his belief in some transcendental force which he variously identified as God, Fortune or the Cosmos. In a speech to the Harvard College Class of 1861, he said the following:
Life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual tone that gives meaning to the whole. It transmutes the dull details into romance. It reminds us that our only but wholly inadequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole (Holmes, "The Class" 97).
In a speech in 1895, he said, "If . . . you have known . . . the vicissitudes or terror and of triumph in war, you know that there is such a thing as faith" (Hill 4).
Throughout his career as a jurist, Holmes was frequently called upon to reconcile the needs of the individual and those of society. He was exposed as a young man to New England philosophers and writers who through the transcendentalist movement sought to fashion a new sectarian philosophy under which the individual could find meaning in life amid the oppressive forces of religion and convention. He knew Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were acquaintances. He rejected the views of Henry David Thoreau, who withdrew from society.
Bowen quotes him as saying that "life is action and passion; therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at the peril of being judged not to have lived" (192). Holmes also said that "life is action, the use of one's powers" (Holmes, "Speech" 75). At the same time, Hill says that "the New England in which Justice Holmes grew up had accepted as fundamental dogma that the individual should be let alone and that thought and talk and writing should be unrestrained by law" (11-12).
As a young man, he served as an officer in the Union army and was severely wound...