There is in the history of jurisprudence no more significant event than the foundation of the historical school by Gustav Hugo and Carl von Savigny. Jurisprudence, up to that time, was not a science, at least not a science in the modern acceptation of the term. It was an art, which the practical lawyer learned and employed in strict conformity with practical traditions, without reflecting on the reasons in virtue of which a legal norm or a social institution existed. The only part of jurisprudence of a scientific tendency was the philosophy of law. This latter branch had, since Hugo Grotius, emancipated itself from the church, but it had advanced no farther than to substitute for the will of God, to which formerly right and wrong had been traced, the principle of human nature, and to found upon the social instincts of man a system of natural law,—an ideal jurisprudential state by reference to which positive laws were tested in respect of their conformity with the ideally right and the ideally wrong. This fundamental conception of the essential character of law was only slightly modified by the substitution of the human reason for human nature. The rational systems of jurisprudence also derived the state and the law from the individuality of man, especially from the social traits of this individuality, and definite notions and principles were thus enunciated from which state and law were deductively constructed. The historical school first introduced a change in all this. It afforded the legal practitioner the possibility of seeing that the law which he applied was the slowly ripened product of a course of development that extended over many centuries, and it afforded the philosophical juristic inquirer the possibility of understanding, that the law was not founded on immutable ideas and principles, but that it was a product of the creative mind of a nation, that this product was subjected to processes of transformation and development, and did not admit of regulation by the individual reason of a single philosophical inquirer. But while the history of law has become a universally recognised discipline in the science of jurisprudence, the application of its underlying principles to the philosophy of law has as yet by no means been universally carried out. On the contrary, the reason still plays an extensive rôle as foundation and evolutionary principle; and to a great extent the history of law and the philosophy of law still pursue their solitary ways as independent branches of knowledge.