Introduction
when he opposes, in his great work on possession, Savigny’s animus theory;[1] in his conception of rights when he rejects the will as the central factor; in legal method, when he sets up a jurisprudence of facts against a jurisprudence of concepts. The cultivation of Roman law had developed into a deductive process of legal reasoning which sought to make the realities of later centuries and altered circumstances of elapsed time fit arbitrarily the verbal form of ideas of the age of Paulus.[2] But yet Jhering was not the enemy of the subjective in his treatment of legal evolution since this evolution itself is the expression of purpose. Law is not only teleological but psychological. The psychology of legal institutions, however, must have a factual basis, and can not be confined, he insists, to a purely conceptual and unhistorical system of ideas governed by fixed logical constructions.
xxviii
