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54 Law Libr. J. 2 (1961)
Creighton and the Problem of the Macheide

handle is hein.journals/llj54 and id is 28 raw text is: Creighton and the Problem of the Macheide by DONALD W. JOHNSON, Librarian, Creighton University Law School In 1913 a book was published in Germany having nothing to do either with law or librarianship: moreover, this book has never been translated into English.' It may, therefore, seem a trifle remote, but the writer believes that its essence contains certain impli- cations for law libraries in America today. In general, the thesis expressed is this: mankind is gradually growing more perfect, however imperceptibly, and as man approaches perfection his feasible alternatives in any given ac- tion situation are reduced;2 ulti- mately, the last point on this line of gradual perfection of mankind (in a wholly material sense) will be reached, and this final point is named the Macheide, i.e., Son of Battle, because this creature is the product of mil- ILasker, Emanuel. Das Begreifen der Welt. Berlin, H. Joseph, 1913. The title, translated, means The Comprehension of the Universe. En passant, Machelide is pronounced, approximately, moch-kidda. SIn Lasker's theory, choice is limited by 1) knowledge and 2) survival requirements in a fiercely competitive environment. The more one knows of any given subject, the more aware he is of the many wrong answers and of the few right ones; if his knowledge of the subject were com- plete, there could no longer exist even a few right answers: there could be only one right way to act, and if survival of the individual were dependent upon acting in that one right way it follows that natural selection should eventually produce the Macheilde, who might be described as a humanoid variety of automaton, with a sterility of choice that is a bit frightening to comprehend. Still, im. provement, which in theory will produce the Wacheide, is to be desired in the meantime, and we must relentlessly pursue this fearsome end, no matter how distant in time the end may be. The writer's guess is that it is still a few million years away. lions of years of struggle between Man and Nature. No longer does choice exist at all; in each action re- quirement there is one and only one way to act, the stake being survival. One possible application of this theory is that proximity to perfection might be measured by the number of feasible choices in a stipulated action situation, i.e., the more choices avail- able the farther from the Mache'fde. By this measurement, law librarian- ship in America today must be a very long way from the Mache'de, because we are all of us surviving in spite of substantial lack of agreement upon many basic things. For example, a re- cent item in LLJ8 notes that, apart from law libraries having no classifi- cation system at all, and apart from the many published law classification schemes (such as Benyon, Columbia, Dabagh, Department of Justice, De- wey, Los Angeles County Law Li- brary, Wire, and Yale), there are at least 18 different law libraries employ- ing their own unpublished, private systems. Perhaps, then, there are 25-30 different systems used in American law libraries, or even more.4 This is one area in which it might be well for us to recognize the value and impor- tance of the Macheide, for perfection is not to be found in diversity. Surely, we are beset with too much riches 8 49 Law' Library Journal 446. 4 Ellnger includes a detailed analysis and com- parison of law classification schemes in 19 Library Quarterly 79.

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