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The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law This page intentionally left blank [44.204.125.111] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:39 GMT) The science of natural law, like other sciences such as mechanics and physics, has long been recognized as an essentially philosophical science and, since philosophy must have parts, as an essential part of philosophy. But with the other sciences it has shared a common fate; the philosophical element in philosophy is assigned exclusively to metaphysics, while the sciences have been allowed little share in it. On the contrary, in their special principle they have been kept aloof in complete independence of the Idea. In the end, the sciences cited as examples have been compelled more or less to confess their removal from philosophy. As a result they acknowledge that what is commonly called "experience" is their scientific principle and therefore they renounce their claim to be genuine sciences. They are content to consist of a collection of empirical observations and to make use of the categories of the understanding only as suppliants, without wishing to assert anything objective. If, originally against its will, what had called itself a philosophical science was shut out of philosophy and, generally, the category of science, and if in the end it has accepted this position, the reason for this exclusion is not that, although these so-called sciences issued from philosophy itself, they failed to maintain a conscious connection with it. For every part of philosophy is capable in its individuality of being an independent science and acquiring a complete inner necessity of its own, since it is the Absolutewhich makes philosophy a genuine science. In this form the Absolute alone is the special principle which lies above the sphere of science's knowledge and freedom, and, by relation to this principle, the science is possessed by an external necessity. But the Idea itself remains free of this determinacy and it can be reflected in this determinate science just as purely as absolute life is expressed in every living thing, though the scientific element in such a science, or its inner rationality, does not come to light in the pure form of the Idea, which is the essence of every science and which in philosophy, as the absolute science, is present as this pure Idea. Of this independent and yet free scientific development of a science, geometry supplies a brilliant example that is the envy of the other sciences. Allthe same, it does not follow that sciences like those mentioned above must be denied all reality because they are, strictly speaking, empirical. For just as each part 417 56 G. W. F. HEGEL or aspect of philosophy is capable of being an independent science, so each such science is thus immediately an independent and perfect picture and, in the form of a picture, can be accepted and expounded by an intuition which purely and happily keeps itself free from contamination by fixed concepts. But the perfection of the science requires not only that perception and picture be united -with the logical element and taken up into the purely ideal, but also that the separate, though genuine, science be stripped of its separateness; its principle must be recognized in its higher context and necessity, and thus and only thus be completely freed. In this way alone is it possible to know the limits of the science; and without this principle the science must remain ignorant of its limits, because otherwise it would have to be superior to itself and recognize the nature of its principle according to its determinate character in the absolute form. For from this knowledge the science would derive directly the knowledge and certainty of the extentof the equality of its various specifications.But,as it is, its attitude to its own limits can only be empirical,'and it must now make vain attempts to go beyond them, now think them narrower than they are, and thus experience wholly unexpected extensions of scope, as happens even in geometry (which, e.g., can prove the incommensurability of the diameter [diagonal] and the side of the square,but not that of the diameter and the circumference of a circle),0 and even more in arithmetic; and, most of all, geometry and arithmetic in combination provide the greatest example of science fumbling in the dark along its borders. "In the Introduction to his Naturrecht [Introduction ยง1, fn...