Justice Holmes and Natural Law

While doing some research on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Brandeis, I came across Holmes' essay called Natural Law. (It can be found in Collected Legal Papers published in 1952).

In this essay, Holmes says:

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. It seems to me that this demand is at the bottom ... of the jurist's search for criteria of universal validity which he collects under the head of natural law.

And later, Holmes goes on.

The jurists who believe in natural law seem to me to be in that naive state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere.

I don't wish to comment on the rest of what Holmes' says, only this small part. Is that really what natural law is all about. It seems as if Holmes has set up a bit of a straw man. The Declaration of Independence as one of the most familiar documents espousing natural law does not require everyone to accept the self-evident rights it sets forth. It only gives notice that because those rights have not been accepted by all, this particular group has decided to govern itself. There is no requirement that all men everywhere accept natural law.

It seems to me that natural law is about universal truths and the search for them. It is not about requiring all men to accept those truths. Whether or not truth is accepted, it remains truth. Just because Soviet Russia did not accept or recognize the truth that all men have the right to life, the fact continutes that, under universal law, all men do have a right to life.

All that to say, I think Mr. Justice Holmes may have missed the point. Or perhaps he purposefully aimed for obfuscation.