ral jurisprudence denied, hence the legal scholars of the18th Century considered themselves authorized to deduce new principles of positive law from established principles of natural law - which sounds reassuring for the practical viability of natural law as well as for its survival as a field of scientific study. In reality, however, the social and scientific developments of the 18th Century brought about the decline of the authority of natural law as a field of science and as a source of law. For while natural law was an independent source of law in the 17th Century, the legal theory of the 18th Century initiated a development that eventually brought about its dismissal as an independent source of law.120 Methodologically, the demonstrative method ofWolff constituted a development of Descartes’ scientia universalis, and this method was as such an attempt to construe the world rationally by means of the law of contradictions, the law of identity, and the principle of sufficient reason.121 However, the proper application of the method entailed that scientific standards were raised; hence, the last vestiges remaining of scholasticism had to be removed from scientific thought and reasoning. In order to ensure the advancement and potential of secure science,Wolff directed his attention to three central aspects of scientific reasoning: concepts, judgments, and conclusions - categories whose demands for clarity, certainty, and irrefutability respectively were to be raised through a stricter philosophical analysis rather than lax reliance on authority122 (or what Kant would call criticism in preference to unreflective dogmatism or philodoxi).123 Kant thereby established the object of philosophy according to the Wolffian notion as being knowledge of the essentia, knowledge of the potential and possible, in preference to knowledge of the actual and existing124 (even p a r t v i i , c h a p t e r 1 594 120 Bachmann, Die naturrechtliche Staatslehre ChristianWolffs, pp. 13-16;Wieacker, History, pp. 279-282; Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft, pp. 100-104 and 110-112. 121 Röd, Geometrischer Geist, pp. 130 and 132;Winiger, Das rationale PflichtenrechtWolffs, pp. 92-95. 122 Bachmann, Die naturrechtliche Staatslehre ChristianWolffs, pp. 58-61. 123 Kant, Cr. P. R., pp. B xxxvi - xxxvii. 124 Bachmann, Die naturrechtliche Staatslehre ChristianWolffs, pp. 61-65.
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