8o THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



determining the movements of inanimate bodies or masses. 

 For where intelligence is not, or where it is too bounded to 

 take the name of reason, and therefore is too bounded to 

 conceive the purpose of a law, there is not the ivill which 

 law can work on, or which duty can incite or restrain. 

 Yet through the misapplications of a name, flagrant as the 

 metaphor is, has the field of jurisprudence and morals been 

 deluged with muddy speculation " (p. 90). 



Now Austin was absolutely in the right to emphasise 

 the immense distinction between the use of the term lazv 

 in science and its use in jurisprudence. There can be 

 no doubt that the use of the same name for two totally 

 different conceptions has led to a great deal of confusion. 

 But on the one hand, if the flagrant misapplication of the 

 scientific meaning of the word law to the fields of juris- 

 prudence and morals has deluged them with " muddy 

 speculation," there is equal certainty on the other hand 

 that the misapplication of the legal and moral sense of 

 the term has been equally disadvantageous to clear thinking 

 in the field of science. Austin probably had in his mind, 

 when he wrote the above passage, works like Hegel's 

 PJiilosopJiy of Laiu, in which we find the conception of the 

 permanent and absolute character of scientific law applied 

 to build up a system of absolute civil and moral law which 

 somehow realises itself in human institutions. To the 

 mind which has once thoroughly grasped the principle 

 of evolution in its special factor of natural selection, the 

 civil and moral laws of any given society at a particular 

 time must appear as ultimate results of the struggle for 

 existence between that society and its neighbours. The 

 civil and moral codes of a community at any time are 

 those which are on the average best adapted to its current 

 needs, and best calculated to preserve its stability. They 

 are very plastic, and change in every age with the growth 

 and variation of social conditions. What is lawful is what 

 is not prohibited by the laws of a particular society at a 

 particular time ; what is moral is what tends to the welfare 

 of a particular society at a particular time. We are all 

 well acquainted with the continual change of civil law ; in 



