154 Like Ehrström, Montgomery was conscious of the bond between “the direction that the contemporary material criminal law” had taken and the “reformmovement” operating in the field of criminal procedure. In order to mete out the sentence, the newer criminal statutes required a much more specific determination of the accused’s guilt than the older laws based on “more simple grounds of determination [of guilt] and ... absolute penalties.” This kind of information could not be acquired in any other way than through the accusatory procedure."*^ Obviously, Montgomery must have assumed that free evaluation of evidence was part and parcel of the modernization package. Yet, as the rules of proof had definitely been abandoned in Finnish legal practice by the 1880s, there was no point in arguing strongly against the statutory theory of proof any more. That the decisive battle against the theory had been fought in the 1850s and 1860s is further demonstrated by the fact that the actual science of lawof criminal procedure, emerging as an independent discipline in the 1890s, showed no signs of fervent interest in the topic, long since resolved as a scientific issue by both international legal science and national legal practice. The Birth of Scientific Procedural Lawin Finland; Free Evaluation of Evidence inJuristic Writing Procedural law as an independent discipline did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century; before this, the discipline did not have an academic chair of its own nor a place within the legal systematics. The Swedish and Finnish proceduralists remained few, and as to interpreting the law of proof in the Lawof 1734, the fewremained faithful to the strict reading established by Nehrman in the 1750s. Consequently, we notice an ever-widening gap between the juristic literature and the judicial practice as the twentieth century draws closer. This difference between theory and practice is already visible in the work of Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Finland’s leading philosopher of the nineteenth century. In his “Läran omstaten” (“Doctrine on the State”) of 1842, Snellman laid out an all-encompassing theory of the state, including its legal institutions. Through Snellman’s enormously influential teachings, Hegel’s ideas were introduced into Finland. According to Snellman, law was an expression of national sentiment and, simultaneously, its guiding light.Referringto Montesquieu, Snellman stated that every nation’s laws evolved from its history and Montgomery 1880 pp. 136-137. For Forsman, “the subjective side of evidence must be proven through circumstantial evidence, for it cannot he cleared up otherwise, if there is no confession. The inner phenomena of the soul can only be concluded fromouter signs which serve as circumstantial evidence for the inner mental life.” Forsman 1896 (a) p. 329. Snellman 1894 p. 688.
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