Therefore the facts of Jurisprudence and the Science of Right, or of “Natural Right,” as the issue and outcome of Jurisprudence, necessarily counterbalance the extreme ideas of continuous growth and natural causation which social science derives from other analogies. We are reminded that, after all, we are dealing with a self-conscious purposive organism, which is aware of a better and a worse, and has members bound together by conscious intelligence, though, it may be, not by conscious intelligence alone. At one time the ideas of Jurisprudence, such as Sovereignty or Contract, were considered sufficient by themselves to equip a social theory. And if they are now seen to need completion from both sides,--from the side of lower nature, and from the side of the national spirit and culture,--this should not make us neglectful of the important truths which the facts of law and recognised obligation, more than any others, establish on solid ground. _b_. It is of course the case that Law has been treated from the standpoint of economic history in the same way as the other phenomena of civilised life. It may be taken simply as the form into which substantive relations crystallise, under the influence of economic conditions or of other elementary social forces. And obviously such a view has its truth. The social will, like the will of any one of us from day to day, is formed not _in vacuo_, but as the focus of all the influences which penetrate our being. It is a fair object of {37} research to ascertain the economic or other social meaning of the statutes which we find on the statute book; and it is because they have so much meaning that they are excellent object-lessons in the play of the social consciousness and sense of right. But this focussing of social influences makes the laws not less acts of social will, but more. To suppose the contrary would be like supposing that nothing is a true act of will which embodies an individual’s distinctive purposes in life. I will explain by an illustration the relative value of sociological analysis in dealing with the facts of positive law. I am indebted for it to M. Durkheim, whose writings appear to me among the most original and suggestive works of modern sociology. I regret that my immediate purpose does not justify me in stating and appreciating the whole very interesting theory of repressive and contractual law from which the point in question is selected.