We also owe to the historical school the comparison between the life of rights and the life of language; this was prepared by the discoveries of comparative linguistic, which although substantially correct, yet had, as we have observed, the defect of limiting itself to the _grammatical_ form of both facts, not to their genuine and direct reality. Jacobi, in the already quoted effusions of _Woldemar,_ had recourse to the same comparison, for other reasons and with a more exact understanding of its terms; speaking there of the moral infraction of laws, he wrote: "For such exceptions, for such _licences of lofty poetry,_ the grammar of virtue has no definite rules and therefore does not mention them No grammar, least of all the general and philosophical, could contain in itself all that appertains to a living language, and teach how, in every epoch, every dialect must be formed. But it would be unwise to affirm that every one may speak as they feel inclined." And again, "Virtue is free art; and as artistic genius gives laws to art by its creations, so moral genius gives laws to human conduct: just, good, noble, excellent, is what the just, good, noble, and excellent man practises, achieves and produces in conformity with his character; he _invents virtue,_ procures and generates adequate expression for human dignity."[39] [Sidenote: _The concept of law, and the studies of comparative Rights and of the general Doctrine of Rights._] VII. The study of the concept of law is also progressing, and henceforth is not confined to so-called juridical laws and to legislations and codes. Researches into primitive rights and into those of savage and barbarous peoples, known as juridical Ethnography or comparative rights, have greatly contributed to destroy many prejudices; as also the attention that has been directed to facts called social, that is to say, not strictly political. A school that has had independent yet partly similar manifestations in England (Austin, Sumner Maine, etc.) and in Germany, where it has taken the name of school of _the general Doctrine of Rights (allgemeine Rechtslehre,_ according to the denomination given to it by Adolph Merkel), studies in particular the concept of law in its various classes and subclasses; and from it there cannot but issue a more correct understanding of the concept of law, as from the refinement of political Economy into pure Economy has come, first Psychology and then the Philosophy of economy. Meanwhile (and as far as we know) the literature of the school, dominated as it is by the needs of jurisprudence, maintains an empirical or _intellectualistic_ character; and jurists, rather than philosophers themselves, are those that most cultivate it. The distinctions and sub-distinctions of the laws are conducted with subtlety, but are without solid foundation, because the concept posited as basis of law is uncertain and arbitrary. Limiting ourselves to a single example, let us mention Bierling, perhaps the