enthusiastic belief in the historical, traditional life of social
groups as opposed to the intellectual conceptions of individualistic radicalism.
On the other hand, the 19th century was a scientific age and especially an age of biological science. Former periods—the 16th and 17th centuries especially—had bequeathed to it high standards of scientific investigation, an ever-increasing weight of authority in the direction of an exact study of natural phenomena and a conception of the world as ruled by laws and not by capricious interference. But these scientific views had been chiefly applied in the domain of mathematics, astronomy and physics; although great discoveries had already been made in physiology and other branches of biology, yet the achievements of 19th-century students in this respect far surpassed those of the preceding period. And the doctrine of transformation which came to occupy the central place in scientific thought was eminently fitted to co-ordinate and suggest investigations of social facts. As F. York Powell put it, Darwin is the greatest historian of modern times, and certainly an historian not in the sense of a reader of annals, but in that of a guide in the understanding of organic evolution. Though much is expressed in the one name of Darwin, it is perhaps even more momentous as a symbol of the tendency of a great age than as a mark of personal work. To this tendency we are indebted for the rise of anthropology and of sociology, of the scientific study of man and of the scientific study of society. Of course it ought not to be disregarded that the application of scientific principles and methods to human and social facts was made possible by the growth of knowledge in regard to savage and half-civilized nations called forth by the increased activity of European and American business men, administrators and explorers. Ethnography and ethnology have brought some order into the wealth of materials accumulated by generations of workers in this direction, and it is with their help that the far-reaching generalizations of modern inquirers as to man and society have been achieved.
2. It is not difficult to see that the comparative study of legal evolution finds its definite place in a scientific scheme elaborated from such points of view. Let us see how, as a matter of fact, the study in question arose and what its progress has been. The immediate incitement for the formation of comparative jurisprudence was given by the great discoveries of comparative philology. When the labours of Franz Bopp, August Schleicher, Max Müller, W. D. Whitney and others revealed the profound connexion between the different branches of the Indo-European race in regard to their languages, and showed that the development of these languages proceeded on lines which might be studied in a strictly scientific manner, on the basis of comparative observation and with the object of tracing the uniformities of the process, it was natural that students of religion, of folk-lore and of legal institutions took up the same method and tried to win similar results (Sir H. Maine, Rede lecture in Village Communities, 3rd ed.).
It is interesting to note that one of the leading scholars of the Germanistic revival in the beginning of the 19th century, Jacob Grimm, a compeer of Savigny in his own line, took up with fervent zeal and remarkable results not only the scientific study of the German language, but also that of Germanic mythology and popular law. His Rechtsalterthümer are still unrivalled as a collection of data as to the legal lore of Teutonic tribes. Their basis is undoubtedly a narrow one: they treat of the varieties of legal custom among the continental Germans, the Scandinavians and the Germanic tribes of Great Britain, but the method of treatment is already a comparative one. Grimm takes up the different subjects—property, contract, procedure, succession, crime, &c.—and examines them in the light of national, provincial and local customs, sometimes noticing expressly affinities with Roman and Greek law (e.g. the subject of imprisonment for debt, Rechtsalterthümer, 4th ed., vol. ii., p. 165).
A broader basis was taken up by a linguist who tried to trace the primitive institutions and customs of the early Aryans before their separation into divers branches. Adolphe Pictet (Les Origines indo-européennes, i. 1859; ii. 1863) had to touch constantly on questions of family law, marriage, property, public authority, in his attempt to reconstruct the common civilization of the Aryan race, and he did so on the strength of a comparative study of terms used in the different Indo-European languages. He showed, for instance, how the idea of protection was the predominant element in the position of the father in the Aryan household. The names pîtar, pater, πατήρ, father, which recur in most branches of the Aryan race, go back to a root pā-, pointing to guardianship or protection. Thus we are led to consider the patria potestas, so stringently formulated in Roman law, as an expression of a common Aryan notion, which was already in existence before the Aryan tribes parted company and went their different ways. Descriptions of Aryan early culture have been given several times since in connexion with linguistic observations. An example is W. E. Hearn’s Aryan Household (1879). Fustel de Coulanges’ famous volume on the ancient city and Rudolf von Jhering’s studies of primitive Indo-European institutions (Vorgeschichte der Indoeuropäer) start from similar observations, although the first of these scholars is chiefly interested in tracing the influence of religion on the material arrangements of life, while the latter draws largely on principles of public and private law, studied more especially in Roman antiquity.
3. The chief work in that direction has been achieved in one sense by a German scholar, B. W. Leist. His Graeco-Roman legal history, his Jus Gentium of Primitive Aryans, and his Jus Civile of Primitive Aryans, form the most complete and learned attempt not only to reconstitute the fundamental rules of common Aryan law before the separation of tongues and nations, but also to trace the influence of this original stock of juridical ideas in the later development of different branches of the Aryan race. These three books present three stages of comparison, marked by a successive widening of the horizon. He began his legal history by putting together the data as to Roman and Greek legal origins; in the Alt-arisches Jus Gentium the material of Hindu law is not only drawn into the range of observation, but becomes its very centre; in the Alt-arisches Jus Civile the legal customs of the Zend branch, of Celts, Germans and Slavs, are taken into account, although the most important part of the inquiry is still directed to the combination of Hindu, Greek and Roman law. In this way Leist builds up his theories by the comparative method, but he restricts its use consciously and consistently to a definite range. He does not want to plunge into haphazard analogies, but seeks common ground before all things in order to be able to watch for the appearance of ramifications and to explain them. According to his view comparison is of use only between “coherent” lines of facts. Common origin, not similarity of features, appears to him as the fundamental basis for fruitful comparison. It may be said that Leist’s work is characterized by the attempt to draw up a continuous history of a supposed archaic common law of the Aryan race rather than to put different solutions of kindred legal problems by the side of each other. For him Aryan tribal organization with its double-sided relationship—cognatic and agnatic—through men and through women—is one, and although he does not draw its picture as Fustel de Coulanges does by the help of traits taken indiscriminately from Hindu, Roman and Greek material, although he notices divisions, degrees and variations, at bottom he writes the history of one set of principles exemplified and modulated, as it were, in the six or seven main varieties of the race. Even so the nine rules of conduct prescribed by Hindu sacral law are, according to his view, the directing rules of Roman, Greek, Germanic, Celtic, Slavonic legal custom—the duties in regard to gods, parents and fatherland, guests, personal purity, the prohibitions against homicide, adultery and theft—are variations of one and the same religious, moral and legal system, and their original unity is reflected and proved by the unity of legal terminology itself.
The same leading idea is embodied in the books of Otto Schräder—Urgeschichte und Sprachvergleichung (1st ed., 1883; 2nd ed., 1890) and Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde (1901). In this case we have to do not with a jurist
