of exposition is likewise the adaptation of the method made use of by continental jurists and is recommended by our best English scholars. Sir Frederick Pollock and Professor Sheldon Amos sufficiently describe this method and its effect. Pollock says: "Another principle of division is that by which, in dealing either with a whole body of law or with a substantial department thereof, those principles and rules which are found in all or most portions of the subject, so that they may be said to run through it, are disposed of before the several branches are entered upon. Such principles and rules may relate to the nature of duties and rights in themselves, to the condition of their origin, transmission, and extinction, or to the remedies applicable. The setting forth of these matters in advance, so as to avoid repetitions and awkward digressions in the subsequent detailed treatment is called after the German usage, the General part of the work in hand. In the Special part the several topics are dealt with in order and the general principles having already been stated, only those rules are discussed which are peculiar to the subdivision in hand or are in some peculiar way modified in their application to its contents. Thus Savigny's great work on Roman Law is only the "General Part" of his projected system. Well framed legislative acts on large subjects usually proceed in some such manner from the general to the special-thus the first six chapters of the Indian Contract Act contains what a continental writer would call the General Part of the law of contract; namely, rules of law by which the formation, validity, and effect of all kinds of contracts alike are governed in British India. The other chapters which deal with sale, agency and other species of contracts might be called the Special Part of the Act. Notwithstanding the obvious advantages of this method, it has only gradually and of late years come into use among the English lawyers" (4). Professor Amos says: "There is no single topic which, when fully treated, does not involve at once the considerations of Rights, Duties, Procedure, and Penalties. But to treat of these elements at once, under each topic in succession, must involve endless repetitions and vastly increases the bulk. Thus, in English text-books on the Law of Bills of Exchange there will be found not only a description of the nature of such Bills, and of the Rights and Duties of the Parties to them, but also an account of the Laws applicable to Frauds upon them, and to detaining and stealing them, as well as to the modes of Pleading and of Evidence in respect of them. Thus, in treating of Rights of Ownership in Land, it is not possible to avoid constant allusion to certain definitely recognized modes of violating those Rights, such as Trespass. Yet the topic of Trespass is a large and independent one, and will more appropriately fall under the Law of Civil Injuries, and that branch of it which deals with Torts. Only mutual references, combining the two topics, can avoid repetition and omission" (5). § 4. The scientific or institutional system. By the institutional system is meant a plan of study which at the 4 Harvard Law Review, pp. 198-9. outset places before the student an outline of the field he is to investigate and the most fundamental principles of the science he is to apply and the subject he is to investigate and by means of this system at all stages of progress make clear the correlation and interdependence of the various topics. All students of the logical science understand that modern science invokes the same principles which constituted the basis of the Aristotelian System of Philosophy, very concisely expressed by Spencer in his "Synthetic Philosophy:" "The doctrine that correlatives imply one another has for one of its common examples the necessary connection between the conceptions of the whole and the part. Beyond the primary truth that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some whole to which it belongs, there is a secondary truth that there can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole. There are several ways in which inadequate knowledge of the one involves inadequate knowledge of the other." This is the identical idea now applied by modern Germen critics and jurists. It is clearly explained in an article by Richard Meyer in the International Monthly for May, 1901: "What they aimed at, these disciples and successors of the great critics, was the same, in spite of their different fields, in spite of their different natures. They aimed at a wholly new kind of comprehension, one essentially different from what had been previously under stood-as essentially different as is the insight into the anatomical structure of a plant which the microscope gives, from that which the eye had previously permitted. No! The difference is still greater. For it is a question of a qualitative, not merely a quantitive, progress in comprehension." "For us there is no longer such a thing as comprehension apart from universal context. No isolated phenomenon exists any longer, or, if it exist, it can be explained from its isolation." In the German schools, the same idea dominates the conception of jurisprudence. Falck says: "Science is the objective and universal meaning of the term, designates a body of truths methodically arranged. The sciences are divided theoretically into several branches or departments, according to the different objects of knowledge with which they deal. In this way the sum of knowledge which relates to right and law practically constitutes the special science of jurisprudence." "Three things are requisite in order that the representation of the rules of law recognized in a country may really deserve the name of a science. First, the principles of right and law must be so completely treated that no jural relation shall remain unexplained, at least in its essential point. Second, the grounds upon which the jural truths rest must be convincingly developed. Third, and finally, the arrangement of the whole system must be carried out, even in its individual parts, according to the principles of its internal essential connection and not in accordance with an arbitrary scheme. The essential character of the system consists in the union of these three qualities: Completeness, depth or fundamentalness, and order." "Jurisprudence," says Puchta, "is scientific knowledge of the system and history of right. The science of right [law] has therefore two sides, the one systematical [we would say analytical] and the other historical; and in the proportional combination of them, the true method of jurisprudence consists. But this does not exclude the condition that a scientific investigation and exposition of right in some particular relation, may proceed preeminently by the one method rather than by the other. It is not a one-sided method of procedure to give prominence to one side of the whole subject; but the jurist is to be called one-sided when he deals with one side of his subject as if it were the whole of it. The systematical knowledge of right is the scientific knowledge of the inner connection which unites its parts together. The individual part is thus apprehended as a member of the whole, and the whole system is viewed as a body that unfolds itself in particular organs. It is only the systematic knowledge of the right that can be regarded as a complete knowledge of it. Were we to regard the science of right as a mere aggregate of jural propositions we would never be certain that we had made it our own in its whole extent; just as a part of a heap of stones may be wanting without the spectator becoming aware of the defect, whereas, when they are built into a work of art, a single stone cannot be wanting without the blank becoming manifest. And so it is, conversely, in |