As we have seen, Addison asserted in 1847 that the principles of contract law were immutable, universal and eternal. This kind of assertion rests on an assumption that contract law everywhere must be governed by the same principles, a proposition that might aptly be described as a ‘syncretic and ahistorical supposition’. An examination of the doctrine of consideration, before and after 1847, shows that the conceptual bases of the doctrine, often, but not always, called principles, have varied markedly from time to time, as has the substance of the law.