Austin’s logic is unrelenting, and the loyalty of his followers unflinching. Sir Henry Maine having shown that throughout the greater part of history the world has been full of independent political societies possessing no law-making sovereign at all, and it having become notorious that legislation has everywhere played a late and comparatively subordinate part in the production of law, the latest writers of the Austinian school have reduced jurisprudence to a merely formal science, professing to care nothing for the actual manner in which law may originate, nothing even for most of the motives which induce men to obey law, provided you will but concede that there is, among a great many other imperative motives, one which is universally operative, namely, the fear of the compulsion of physical force, and that there is at least one sovereign function, namely, the application of that physical force in the carrying out of the law. They ask to be allowed to confine themselves to such a definition of positive law as will limit it to “rules which are _enforced_ by a political superior in his capacity as such.” They take for their province only a systematic description of the forms and method “of the influence of government upon human conduct” through the operation of law. They thus virtually abandon the attempt to find any universal doctrines respecting the _rôle_ of government as a _maker_ of laws. For them government is not a creative agent, but only an instrumentality for the effectuation of legal rules already in existence. So hard is the principle of life to get at that they give over all attempts to find it, and, turning away from the larger topics of the biology, restrict themselves to the morphology, of law.