reference to the precise determination of the outline of the whole.'

Prof. Hastie, who translates a considerable portion of the writings of the modern German jurists, for use in the universities of Great Britain, after explaining the relative fields occupied by the great German jurists, Savigny and Puchta, as representatives of the historical school, Falck and Friedlander, as exponents of the analytical or systematic school of exposition, says:

"These elements, notwithstanding their different origin, constitute a unity in virtue of their relation to the unity of the science. It is their treatment from different points of view of that unity which forms the characteristic method of this little book. That method is briefly the representation of all the rational elements in the science as constituting one systematic whole. Such a method, if legitimately carried out and successfully realized, is not only a convenient guide to the synoptic arrangement and study of the science, but the principal means of giving prominence and certainty to its constituent truths. If the relations of its parts are shown to be real, and are realized in their inter-connection, every part of the science thus established will give cohesion and stability to every other part and to the whole.

"This is what the Germans mean by Encyclopædia as a method of science, and even as the highest culminating method of reason, in its ultimate determination of truth. It is this idea which, in its varied application to the different departments and details of empirical knowledge, has been gradually making all knowledge systematic, and

uniting it into an organic whole. The conception practically evolved and applied in England by Bacon and later thinkers, has been more methodically dealt with in Germany by her recent masters of thought, and more formally applied by workers in detail to their special sciences. The Encyclopædic Method has thus been systematically applied by the German jurists to their proper science, and much of their success as comprehensive and original thinkers and investigators has been due to it. In view of that success, and especially of the degree in which they have thus been guarded against one-sidedness and the aberrations of a partial method, it seems more than time that both the name and the reality of Juristic Encyclopædia, should be introduced into England.

"Juristic Encyclopædia is not only the proper scientific form of introduction to the science of jurisprudence generally, but it is also the appropriate disciplinary preparation for the systematic study of positive law. It stands to it in a relation analogous to that of mathematics to the physical sciences, or of grammar to the details of the several languages. It may thus be said to exhibit the definitions, axioms, and forms of proof, or the elements, rules and relations involved in all legal systems. The urgency of its requisiteness and the degree of its availability will depend upon the character and constituents of the particular system under consideration. But it is universally felt and acknowledged that there is no system in relation to which the student so much requires the help and guidance of introductory discipline and conscious method as that of English law. English law, says Mr.

Frederic Harrison, 'is of all the systems of law that one which most requires a scientific introduction by a training in principles.' Mr. Austin has also well said: "To the student who begins the study of the English law without some previous knowledge of the rationale of law in general, it naturally appears an assemblage of arbitrary and unconnected rules. But if he approach it with a wellgrounded knowledge of the general principles of jurisprudence, and with the map of a body of law distinctly impressed upon his mind, he might obtain a clear conception of it as a system or organic whole, with comparative ease and rapidity.'"

In like manner, Mr. Phillips, in his able and independent discussion of jurisprudence, says:

"I firmly believe that the intolerable aridity usually attributed to legal study is entirely due to the infatuation with which the student usually persists in exploring the details of his science before he comprehends its outlines. What every jurist has first to do is to make himself master, not of the law itself, which may be pernicious and must be imperfect, but of that great system of jural problems which forms the framework of all law, and which, as it arises out of the conditions of human existence, must retain its importance while the human race survives. To all this nothing further need be added to justify an attempt to meet such a crying practical want, and to remedy in some measure such deplorable unscientific confusion. It is confidently claimed for the following pages, notwithstanding their foreign origin, that the simplicity, comprehensiveness, and vitality of

the scientific conceptions they present are fitted not only to guide the student along the great open highway of jurisprudence, but to conduct him intelligently to all the special fields of law-English, Scottish, American, or however named-that he may desire to reach and to cultivate."

§ 5. The same: Views of American scholars. The late Dr. Hammond, who is universally acknowledged to be one of our greatest legal scholars, points out the cardinal defect in our legal education in the following terse language: "Another matter which seems to me of great importance, but in which our courses have heretofore been signally deficient, is the teaching of law as a system. In schools of the first rank, where each of a dozen different branches of the law is admirably taught, not a single lecture or recitation, from the beginning to the end of the year, is heard upon the connection between these, the classification of the law, or the relation of these parts to the whole. The graduate of such a course may know perfectly the rules of contract, or torts, or equity, etc., but when a case arises in real life he can never be sure that there is not lurking somewhere in the vast fields of law a rule that may bear upon the facts presented, and change their entire meaning. No man can be a safe counselor, or even feel reliance on his own judgment, while his knowledge of the law is thus confined to its detached parts. I do not mean that the student must learn all the law. Such a requirement would be absurd. It is as true of the law as of every other subject of human knowledge that a good education consists not merely in knowing the

E

most necessary part of it, but equally in knowing the existence of that larger part that lies beyond. The most hopeless ignorance of a subject is that which, knowing some little corner or fraction of it, takes that for the whole, and knows not its own ignorance of the rest. The only fatal ignorance is that which knows not where to look for information" (6).

The tendency of most recent thought to return to the scientific method may be gathered from the following extract from an article by Professor Monroe Smith, of Columbia College (7):

"In a period of educational experiments, such as that through which we are now passing in the United States, it is of interest to consider the phases through which legal education has passed in Europe. Office training, the textbock system, the lecture system and the case system are all very ancient things; and there is hardly any conceivable combination of these systems that has not existed in Europe at some time within the last twenty centuries.

"Two thousand years ago the young Roman who desired to learn the law associated himself as auditor with a jurist of established reputation."

"With all this, there were books to be read. There were already standard treatises; systematic presentations of the civil (or as we should say, common) law, monographs on special topics, and above all, collections of the decisions rendered by eminent jurists which had been accepted as authoritative precedents.

• Southern L. Rev. 422 (1881).

▾ Columbia University Quarterly, March, 1902.