This is the fundamental idea of modern ethnology. It seeks to collect all the expressions of the human soul in the life of the species, and from them to derive its inferences as to the nature of man. It regards ethnic existence as the precipitate of human psychical existence, and not merely of that part of it which is conscious, but also of that part of it which is unconscious, that which is inaccessible to introspective observation, that which is not thought, but is merely lived. It enlarges accordingly the domain of psychology, which was restricted hitherto to the analysis of the human consciousness, by the incorporation of an additional domain unmeasured in extent. These general conceptions of ethnology are also determinative for the science of ethnological jurisprudence, and from this results its peculiarity as contrasted with the other branches of juristic knowledge. Ethnological jurisprudence places the centre of gravity of the science of law not like the previous juristic philosophy in the individual jural consciousness, but in the law viewed as a province of ethnic existence. It regards the laws of the nations as the precipitates of that which is now active and has been active as jural instinct in the entire human race. It assumes that when all the phenomena of law in the life of the nations have been fixed, an infinitely more valuable material will be drawn therefrom adapted to the disclosure of the nature of law than could have ever in the world been acquired by an analysis of the individual jural consciousness. It does not regard the individual jural consciousness as something innate in man and exempt from the altering effects of time, but as a product of the social conditions in which the individual has grown up. It assumes, therefore, that the individual jural consciousness changes with a change of the social conditions, so that a man who grows up under different social conditions possesses a different jural perception. This assumption, if we compare the expressions of the jural consciousness of races low in the scale of culture with those of civilised peoples, is one that cannot be escaped. We have only to recall to mind the irresistible force with which the jural sense of peoples that live under clan-constitutions demand vengeance of blood, whereas this species of retaliation no longer exists in our jural consciousness of to-day. Thus there are hundreds and thousands of jural instincts and conceptions which are present at certain stages of civilisation and disappear entirely at others. Ethnological jurisprudence therefore assumes, that the juristic philosopher who lays at the foundation of his system essentially his own jural consciousness, simply enunciates therewith a system of law that answers perhaps to the current conceptions of his time and his people, but which can in no sense lay claim to a value beyond that.