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lish. He judges the past in the light of the present, by modern standards, and he makes individual liberty, according to the modern conception, the absolute criterion of progress. This confusion of relative with absolute ethical standards is a serious defect. It obscures the actual, objective character of human development, and sees the past through colored spectacles. The motive purpose behind political change needs to be stated in terms of the ideas of the epoch under consideration, rather than of those of a subsequent era. Otherwise the motive impulse receives a mystical rather than a scientific expression. In the absolutism of Berolzheimer's goal of emancipation or personal liberty there is something akin to the absolutism of Hegel's conception of pure rationality as affording the explanation of all progress. III. The Fluidity of Culture. — The fundamental fallacy of Hegel's philoso phy lay in the assumption that all reality can be expressed in terms of conscious ness, that the cosmos of nature is a cosmos of ideas, and that the goal of philosophy is achieved by the formula tion of a complete doctrine of ideas. This fallacy led to a one-sided and dis torted philosophy possessing sterility on the phenomenological side, in view of the want of a clear interpretation of the dynamic or mechanical cosmos, resulting from what was tantamount, in the identification of subject and object, to a denial of the objective cate gory of being. This grave defect is par ticularly noticeable in the ultimate bear ing of Hegel's theories of society, gov ernment, and law. One of the chief ideas adopted from the system of Hegel by the Neo-Hegelian school of jurisprudence is the con cept of culture. "It is Hegel's greatest
merit as a political philosopher to have replaced the Rechtsstaat by the Kulturstaat," says Berolzheimer, "to have accomplished the affiliation of law with culture."12 It would appear that the doctrine of culture is rather to be associated with Kohler than with Hegel. Pound says: "Kohler takes as his starting point a dictum of Hegel that law is a phe nomenon of culture."13 And Kohler has worked out a definition of culture. Culture, he says, "is the development of the powers residing in man to a form expressing the destiny of man."14 This is vague. "The culture of a people," he says, "determines the development and form of its law."15 This explains the action of culture, without explaining its genesis or function. It would not be difficult to define culture from a socio logical standpoint. We are here con cerned with a special point of view. From passages cited by Berolzheimer,16 it may be concluded that culture is the collective view of life taken by society, including ethical and religious views; it is a tissue of ideals which strive for embodiment and expression in the actual law. The effort to embody culture in law may be conscious or unconscious. Culture being thus a complex, it would seem, of ideals, it would be un necessary to show the basis of the impulse to realize them in practice, for culture is from the very nature of the definition teleological and contains its own motive impulse. The critic of Kohler's culture doctrine perhaps need not complain of the lack of fuller light on the mode in which culture expresses itself. The possible modes of realizing "P. 230. » "Sociological Jurisprudence," in 24 and 25 Harvard Law Rev.; see v. 25, p. 155. Pound, ibid., p. 157. 15 Berolzheimer, p. 422. 1S Pp. 422-1.
