1903-4. | SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LAw. 65 
dominion inspires naught but fear. Men imagine wars of gods and giants, 
and people the heavens with beings endowed in an exaggerated form with 
the same attributes themselves possess, and in this way account for what 
they see around them. Out of this groping after truth Science has grown; 
Chaos has been reduced to order; Nature girded with a beauty and grandeur 
inconceivable to our ancestors; the forces once deemed the sport of malig- 
nant demons have been chained to the service of man and made his docile 
slaves. These beneficent results have been accomplished in the slow 
progress of the ages by the persevering labours of men of science. How 
‘is it with English law? I fear the answer must be far from satisfactory. 
But before going farther, it may be well to consider what is meant by 
‘Jaw,” and we shall find that its meaning is not so certain as might be 
thought. When we speak of the law of gravitation, we mean something 
totally different from the law which hangs a criminal for murder; the law 
of the conservation of energy has no analogy to the law which enables 
a landlord to distrain on the goods of his tenant for rent due on a lease; 
the law which determines the equation to the catenary has no conceivable 
relation to the law which established the rule in Shelley’s case. In the for- 
mer of these instances it is manifest that we mean by ‘‘law’ a theoretical 
principle deduced from particular facts applicable to a defined group or class 
of phenomena and expressed by the statement that a particular phenom- 
enon always occurs if certain conditions be present, or, as Johnson has it, 
an established and constant mode or process, a fixed correspondence of 
cause and effect; in the latter instances we mean by ‘“‘law” a rule, whether 
proceeding from formal enactment or from custom, which a particular state 
or community recognizes as binding on its members or subjects, and collect- 
ively ‘‘the law” is the whole body of such rules. 
Science, which is only another name for knowledge formulated or 
systematized, has been successful in reducing by the Baconian method of 
induction, the first named laws to definite systems; but it is far otherwise 
with the latter, so far at least as English law is concerned. Blackstone 
made a heroic attempt to compress the whole body of English law, as it 
existed in his time, within the compass of four portly volumes; and subse- 
quent writers have in innumerable text-books summa ized the laws appli- 
cable to specific branches or divisions of the law; but these books, admirable 
as many, if not most of them are, are commentaries on the laws, and not 
the laws themselves. Philosophical jurists like Bentham and Austin, have 
theorized on codification, but the enormous difficulties in the way of reducing 
to system the crude mass of unwritten and judge-made law and merging 
it in the equally crude mass of statute law, combined with the innate conser- 
vatism that is’so strong a factor in English character, has hitherto prevented 
any substantial progress. To codify the whole English law would require 
a long time and the labours of many minds. Hic labor, hoc opus est. But 
