mined the scientific and philosophical authority of the old uncritical natural law dogmatism by demonstrating the inherent inadequacy of the categorical axioms of natural law, as well as demonstrating the historical origin of its ostensibly eternal ethical premisses.171 The way thus paved by Kant’s critique allowed an intellectual reappraisal of the fundamentals of scientific reasoning, which entailed that the historical element of reality was to be given a higher status than it hitherto had in science (see for instance Schelling’s philosophy). In jurisprudence, the reappraisal of history was made particularly manifest in the program of the German Historical School of Jurisprudence, according to which, law was an historical category that must be studied by reference to: “the historical genesis of present law rather than by the abstractions of the Law of Reason or the commands of an enlightened legislator, but it does not mean that historical research should take the place of its [law’s] dogmatics.”172 However, what was stressed was that the unbalanced philosophical analysis that law hitherto had been subjected to by the Law of Reason had to be balanced by an historical analysis of law, an analysis that explained the historical, actual causes to a specific rule of law rather than its philosophical, potential causes. Accordingly, during the 19th Century the decline of natural law, both as a source of law and as a field of academic study, accelerated. This process eventually made natural law dispensable to practicing lawyers. By the second half of the 19th Century natural law ceased to be law and was transformed into: “ … eine bloße philosophische Betrachtung des Rechts ohne unmittelbaren Geltungsanspruch, die ‘Rechtsphilosophie’.”173 This was a transformation that finally forced legal theory to exclude natural law from the doctrine of sources.174The ultimate reason explaining a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 607 171 See Wieacker, History, pp. 281-282. 172 Ibid., p. 283. 173 Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft, p. 203. 174 Ibid., pp. 202-204. In Scandinavia professor of civil law, Roman law, legal history, jurisprudence etc Knut Olivecrona (1817-1905), in a discussion regarding the form
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