essence, wheels in a circle of appearances, informations, and destructions, which necessarily excludes the idea of absolute truth, and destroys providence and liberty.
Corresponding to these two schools of history, there are two schools of jurisprudence, similarly opposed, and possessed of the same peculiarities.
1. The practical and conventional school, to which the law is always a creation of the legislator, an expression of his will, a privilege which he condescends to grant,—in short, a gratuitous affirmation to be regarded as judicious and legitimate, no matter what it declares.
2. The fatalistic and pantheistic school, sometimes called the historical school, which opposes the despotism of the first, and maintains that law, like literature and religion, is always the expression of society,—its manifestation, its form, the external realization of its mobile spirit and its ever-changing inspirations.
Each of these schools, denying the absolute, rejects thereby all positive and à priori philosophy.
Now, it is evident that the theories of these two schools, whatever view we take of them, are utterly unsatisfactory: for, opposed, they form no dilemma,—that is, if one is false, it does not follow that the other is true; and, united, they do not constitute the truth, since they disregard the absolute, without which there is no truth. They are respectively a thesis and an antithesis. There remains to be found, then, a synthesis, which, predicating the absolute, justifies the will of the legislator, explains the variations of the law, annihilates the theory of the circular movement of humanity, and demonstrates its progress.
The legists, by the very nature of their studies and in spite of their obstinate prejudices, have been led irresistibly to sus-
