Thus, if I am right, the relation of pure “sociological” causation to juristic facts is the well-known relation of the more abstract to the more concrete sciences, usually illustrated in logic by the relation of the physical and the musical account of musical sound. For the pure physicist, a harmony and a discord are only two different combinations of shakings. For the musician they are not only opposite effects, but are causes of divergent consequences. So with the relation between a strong collective sentiment and a true law. A strong sentiment, as such, is a mere fact, a mere force; and as such the sociologist regards it. A law involves the pretension to will what is just, and is therefore a sentiment and something more, viz., the point of view of social good. It aims at a right and implies a wrong, and demands to be apprehended and judged on this ground. A mere force cannot by its reaction constitute a crime; for that a law is necessary. The ideal aspect of law as recognition of right is no less actual, no less solid and verifiable, than the facts of sentiment or necessity which may have suggested and sustained it. In this way the relation of sociological causation to the facts of Jurisprudence is typical of the whole relation of Sociology conceived as a natural science, to the larger facts with which social theory has to deal. v. But the ideas involved in mere legality, though they bear emphatic testimony to the conscious and artificial aspect of the social whole, have always {40} been regarded with some justice as the type of what is empty and formal. To treat a law as a command with a penalty annexed, or to enunciate the tendency of social progress as being from status to contract, may convey important meanings, but is obviously very far short of the whole truth. And, indeed, generalisations of this kind, though characteristic of a certain class of reflective Jurisprudence, do not at all represent the highest level which has been reached within the science of right itself. But yet, as we pass beyond these everyday working conceptions, we are beginning to leave the central ground of Jurisprudence, and to move towards a point of view which deals more completely with life and culture. The need and occasion for such a point of view may be measured by that revival of national individuality which was referred to in the last chapter as constituting the true ground and occasion for the rebirth of genuine political philosophy in modern times. Montesquieu’s investigation into the “spirit of laws,” and his treatment of a law as something deeper than a command, following upon the similar endeavours of Vico, was in fact a recognition of the fundamental unity of a national civilisation, which, on its political side, even Hobbes and Locke had already attempted to explain by help of the inadequate instruments furnished to them by legal theory. Montesquieu’s and Vico’s conceptions were only the forerunners of the many-sided