INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT.

GENERAL DEFINITIONS, AND DIVISIONS.

A. What the Science of Right is.

The Science of Right has for its object the principles of all the laws which it is possible to promulgate by external legislation. Where there is such a legislation, it becomes, in actual application to it, a system of positive right and law; and he who is versed in the knowledge of this system is called a jurist or jurisconsult (jurisconsultus). A practical jurisconsult (jurisperitus), or a professional lawyer, is one who is skilled in the knowledge of positive external laws, and who can apply them to cases that may occur in experience. Such practical knowledge of positive right, and law, may be regarded as belonging to jurisprudence (jurisprudentia) in the original sense of the term. But the theoretical knowledge of right and law in principle, as distinguished from positive laws and empirical cases, belongs to the pure science of right (jurisscientia). The science of right thus designates the philosophical and systematic knowledge of the principles of natural right. And it is from this science that the immutable principles of all positive legislation must be derived by practical jurists and lawgivers.

B. What is Right?

This question may be said to be about as embarrassing to the jurist as the well-known question, "What is truth?" is to the logician. It is all the more so, if, on reflection, he strives to avoid tautology in his reply and recognise the fact that a reference to what holds true merely of the laws of some one country at a particular time is not a solution of the general problem thus proposed. It is quite easy to state what may be right in particular cases (quid sit juris), as being what the laws of a certain place and of a certain time say or may have said; but it is much more difficult to determine whether what they have enacted is right in itself, and to lay down a universal criterion by which right and wrong in general, and what is just and unjust, may be recognised. All this may remain entirely hidden even from the practical jurist until he abandon his empirical principles for a time and search in the pure reason for the sources of such judgements, in order to lay a real foundation for actual positive legislation. In this search, his empirical laws may, indeed, furnish him with excellent guidance; but a merely empirical system that is void of rational principles is, like the wooden head in the fable of Phaedrus, fine enough in appearance, but unfortunately it wants brain.

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