yohn Austin and his Wife. merits of Mr. Austin as a jurist; but it can not be denied, with his lectures before us in printed form, that he failed singularly to show to ordinary minds the connection be tween the truths he expounded and the practical work for which they were endeavor ing to fit themselves. It is no answer to this to say that his conception of the subject was too dignified to permit his illustrating it from the particular rules of English law. The dignity of teaching consists, first of all, in what it accomplishes; and the first condition of this accomplishment is that the teacher reach out (or down, as the case may be) to the learner's mind, and secure his hold on that. Mr. Austin might well have taken to heart some lines from a poem, the whole of which we are thankfully certain (on chrono logical grounds) he never read, — "Nor let him get so far before his age, He loses sight of it, as we have seen A locomotive breaking from its train; Be sure to keep the string within his hands, As kite-flyers do, and running raise mankind." It seems to the writer, too, that amid all the praise lavished upon Austin's lectures since their tardy publication in 1863, the chief merit of his work has been lost sight of, and its aims entirely neglected. Certainly in the host of writers who have echoed his phrases, and accepted his theories as finalities, I cannot think of one who has set himself the task of carrying out Austin's main purpose, — the work to which all his theorizing was meant to be merely preparatory; though in fact it occupied him so long that in the final failure of the lectures as lectures, the principal work was left very incomplete. That work was intended to be, not an inves tigation of the sources of law, but a thorough analysis of the present contents of the law. He found the law expressed in loose and am biguous terms, from which no exact reason ing could be drawn, because each of them was used to denote several different notions, or one notion the relation of which to others was undefined, or (still more frequently) sev-
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eral different aspects or stages of one notion or relation. Austin aimed at a more accurate defini tion of legal terms, but this was by no means all. He rightly valued legal terms as the representatives of those legal conceptions in which the entire body of the common law, if not of all law, has its being, and he aimed at a clear and exhaustive inventory of these conceptions. His object was to so fix and define each term that it should have one pre cise meaning, and that it could be used (as a mathematical term might be) in the different members of a syllogism, or in any other steps of argument without the risk of a fal lacy from varying senses of the same term. He knew that there could be no true science that had not such exact terms to reason with. They are the units of arithmetic, the points and lines of geometry; and any attempt at science without them would be like reckon ing "big" and "little" pieces of chalk, or surveying a field by the paces of a dozen different individuals, measuring each from his own starting-point. To use his own language as to this object (p. 34) : " Having determined the province of jurisprudence, and distinguished general from particular jurisprudence, I shall analyze cer tain notions which meet us at every step, as we travel through the science of law." Of these leading notions, or these leading ex pressions, he then gives a list, beginning with " Person and Thing," ending with " Sanc tion," some thirty or more in all. True, he includes this analysis of " notions which pervade the science of law " among the "merely prefatory, though necessary or inev itable matter," and states the main subject of his lectures as consisting in the considera tion of law, its sources, purposes, etc. (p. 35). But to get the true force of this we must recall his theory. Had he recognized the common law as it really is, existent apart from enactment, and immersed in these very con ceptions of fact which he was analyzing, he would have seen that this analysis was of the very body and essence of his subject. It be
