book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician's text with Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him. For Gothic man — so far as he reflected about himself at all — the question was not whether he should look for linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for them. He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the present. On the spiritual side the past which presented itself to him was ancient Israel; on the mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics he saw all about him. What was revered was revered not because it was great, but because it was old and distant. If these men had known Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the language of our Culture would have developed differently.
As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were "received" in any and every field as Roman law was "received" in Germany, and their further development assumed the form of a slow and unwilling self-emancipation. "Reception" of Aristotle, of Euclid, of the Corpus Juris, means in this Culture (in the Magian East it was different) discovering a ready-made vessel for our own thought a great deal too soon, with the result of making a historically built kind of man into a slave of concepts. The alien life-feeling, of course, did not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his own life-feeling's development of an unconstrained speech of its own.
Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible — there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. The Western jurist became a philologist, and practical experience of life was replaced by scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposition of legal concepts on self-contained foundations.
Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period. Neither the Code Napoleon nor the Prussian Landrecht, neither Grotius nor Mommsen, was definitely conscious of this fact. Neither in the training of the legal profession nor in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this — the genuine — " source" oi valid law.
And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization's economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied
