[57] _Mutterrecht und Vaterrecht_, 69, denies that women have ever attained political headship; but (113, 114) declares, though the researches of the philologists make it probable that the Aryans lived under the rule of house-fathers, that neither this fact nor any other circumstance tells against the view that mother-right coexisted from antiquity; while, in a still more remote period, this may have implied matriarchal power in the family; but of such a matriarchate no proofs are presented. But the patriarchal theory, strictly considered, fares little better than the maternal at the hands of recent investigators. Leist, who has been able with wonderful completeness to reconstruct the juridical life of the early household, though largely on the basis of old Indic sources, declares positively that "the Aryan people has not within itself a single element of patriarchalism."[58] This statement, as Bernhöft observes,[59] is perhaps too sweeping, even when tested by the results of Leist's own researches; but the patriarchal family of Sir Henry Maine does not appear. The evolution of juridical conceptions among the old Aryans, according to Leist, presents two general phases. First is the _rita_ stage, or period of fixed, divinely appointed order, of natural law, corresponding to the Greek _cosmos_ or _phusis_ and the Latin _ratum_ or _ratio naturalis_. In this "natural _history_" or pantheistic stage there is at first little idea of law as something to be separately contemplated. Under _rita_ is comprehended the unchangeable order observable in the material world as well as in the physical and social life of man; but the universe and the creative energy, the All and Varuna, are identified or blended in thought.[60] Only slowly are these concepts differentiated and the immutable order of nature becomes looked upon as _dhama_, or a holy ordinance established by Varuna, who now appears as a protecting and creative spirit. [58] LEIST, _Graeco-italische Rechtsgeschichte_, 64. This work is continued in the _Alt-arisches Jus Gentium_, the two books really constituting a single treatise. Compare the more conservative view of JOLLY, _Ueber die rechtliche Stellung der Frau_, 4 ff., 20-22, and _Hindu Law of Partition_, 76 ff., who, however, denies the existence of an authority on the part of the Hindu husband equal to that of the Roman _pater_. [59] BERNHÖFT, "Zur Geschichte des eur. Familienrechts," _ZVR._, VIII, 12, 15, who also regards the view of DARGUN, _Mutterrecht und Raubehe_, 8, 13, as extreme. _Cf._ his "Principien des eur. Familienrechts," _ZVR._, IX, 416, n. 39. KOHLER favors the patriarchal system and agnation for the Indic peoples, in _ZVR._, VII, 201, 210, 216; X, 85. HEARN, _Aryan Household_, chaps. iii-vi, _passim_, takes practically the same view as Maine regarding the patriarchal theory, rejecting entirely for the Aryans the matriarchal hypothesis.