All these themes can be found in Holmes's famous 1897 essay, "The Path of the Law". There Holmes attacks formalist approaches to judicial decision making and states a pragmatic definition of "law": "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law". If law is prophecy, Holmes continues, we must reject the view of "text writers" who tell us that law "is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason that is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not, which may or may not coincide with the decisions".