As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were “received” in any and every field as Roman law was “received” in Germany, and their further development assumed the form of a slow and unwilling self-emancipation. “Reception” of Aristotle, of Euclid, of the _Corpus Juris_, means in this Culture (in the Magian East it was different) discovering a ready-made vessel for our own thought a great deal too soon, with the result of making a historically built kind of man into a slave of concepts. The alien life-feeling, of course, did not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his own life-feeling’s development of an unconstrained speech of its own. Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible--there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. The Western jurist became a philologist, and practical experience of life was replaced by scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposition of legal concepts on self-contained foundations. Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that _private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period_. Neither the Code Napoléon nor the Prussian Landrecht, neither Grotius nor Mommsen, was definitely conscious of this fact. Neither in the training of the legal profession nor in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this--the genuine--“source” of valid law. And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of _the Late Classical economy_. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization’s economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied up such all-important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical life. The book puts itself between the facts and the perception of them. The learned--meaning thereby the book-learned--weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law’s outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who--to gain their private ends, as he thinks--have promoted this opposition.