the way for its own decline. In this section, the works of the Cartesian Aristotelian ChristianWolff serves as the vantage point for the description of the 18th Century natural law theory, especially his purification of the dogmatic mos geometricus. Kant described the method of proper scientific investigation as follows: Christian Wolff is credited with ensuring that the tradition of rationalistic natural law survived well into the 19th Century, primarily by developing and carrying the tradition of mos geometricus into the 18th Century,118 thereby bringing the tradition of natural law to its theoretical summit: “Die deduktive Methode wird im Deutschland im18. Jahrhundert vor allem vonWolff und seiner Schule gehandhabt.Aus Axiomen werden deduktiv immer weitere Maximen abgeleitet. Leitend sind dabei die Sätze vom Widerspruch und vom zureichenden Grunde.”119 Provided the description of Wolff ’s method is correct, then natural jurisprudence is productive in a manner that the earlier schools of natua ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 593 “[In someday carrying out the plan that criticism prescribes, i.e. , in the future system of metaphysics, we will have to follow] the strict method of the famousWolff, the greatest among all dogmatic philosophers, who gave us the first example (an example by which he became the author of a spirit of well-groundedness in Germany that is still not extinguished) of the way in which the secure course of a science is to be taken, through the regular ascertainment of the principles, the clear determination of concepts, the attempt at strictness in the proofs, and the prevention of audacious leaps in inferences.”117 117 Kant, Cr. P. R., p. B xxxvi. However, Kant continued: “… for these reasons he had the skills for moving a science such as metaphysics into this condition, if only it had occurred to him [Wolff] to prepare the field for it by a critique of the organ, namely pure reason itself: a lack that is to be charged not so much to him as to the dogmatic way of thinking prevalent in his age; and for this the philosophers of his as well as all previous times have nothing for which to reproach themselves. Those who reject his kind of teaching and simultaneously the procedure of the critique of pure reason can have nothing else in mind except to throw off the fetters of science altogether, and transform work into play, certainty into opinion, and philosophy into philodoxy.” Kant, Cr. P. R., pp. B xxxvi - xxxvii. 118 Röd, Geometrischer Geist, pp. 117-118; Bachmann, Die naturrechtliche Staatslehre ChristianWolffs, pp. 30-31; Deutsche und Europäische Juristen, Schröder and Kleinheyer, eds., Wolff. 119 Coing, Privatrecht 1, p. 70.
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