Section 2. (b) The Method of Natural Science.[40]
If now we ask how we are to plan our work, what method we are to follow, we must agree that to establish scientifically the principles of our discipline alone is not sufficient. If we are to make progress, the daily routine also must be scientifically administered. Every sentence, every investigation, every official act must satisfy the same demand as that made of the entire juristic science. In this way only can we rise above the mere workaday world of manual labor, with its sense-dulling disgust, its vexatious monotony, and its frightful menace against law and justice. While jurists merely studied the language of dead laws, expounding them with effort unceasing, and, one may complain, propounding more, we must have despaired of ever being scientific. And this because law as a science painfully sought justification in deduction from long obsolete norms and in the explanation of texts. To jurisprudence was left only the empty shell, and a man like Ihering[41] spoke of a “circus for dialectico-acrobatic tricks.”
Yet the scientific quality is right to hand. We need only to take hold of the method, that for nearly a century has shown itself to us the most helpful. Since Warnkönig (1819)[42] told us, “Jurisprudence must become a natural science,” men have rung changes upon this battle cry (cf. Spitzer[43]). And even if, because misunderstood, it led in some directions wrongly, it does seem as if a genuinely scientific direction might be given to our doctrines and their application. We know very well that we may not hurry. Wherever people delayed in establishing the right thing and then suddenly tried for it, they went in their haste too far. This is apparent not only in the situations of life; it is visible, in the very recent hasty conclusions of the Lombrosists, in their very good, but inadequate observations, and unjustified and strained inferences. We are not to figure the scientific method from these.[44] It is for us to gather facts and to study them. The drawing of inferences we may leave to our more fortunate successors. But in the daily routine we may vary this procedure a little. We draw there _particular_ inferences from correct and simple observations. “From facts to ideas,” says Öttingen.[45] “The world has for several millenniums tried to subdue matter to preconceptions and the world has failed. Now the procedure is reversed.” “From facts to ideas”--there lies our road, let us for once observe the facts of life without prejudice, without maxims built on preconceptions; let us establish them, strip them of all alien character. Then finally, when we find nothing more in the least doubtful, we may theorize about them, and draw inferences, modestly and with caution.