Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: its recognition would utterly invalidate a strict and scientific treatment of ethnological subjects. An exhibition of indignation on the part of an ethnologist at relatively immoral practices, adds nothing to the solution of ethnological problems. It matters not whether a people live without the institution of marriage, practice cannibalism, offer human sacrifices, impale its wrong-doers or burn its witches and sorcerers; for the sentimental disapproval of such practices, in investigation, tends to disarrange that equipoise of judgment which is requisite to determining the causal relation existing between ethnological phenomena. The ethnologist is called upon to seek this causal relation with the cold indifference of the anatomist. A person who speaks of senseless customs and senseless institutions, is not fitted to engage in ethnological research. The above are the principal points of view which at present admit of establishment for ethnological jurisprudence. Others may suggest themselves as the science is further developed. Section 3 THE ORIGIN OF LEGAL INSTITUTIONS 1. The Imitation Theory l Of all phases of social life the law is that one in which philosophical speculation has in our day been the least exercised. It has been given full scope in comparative philology and mythology in politics, in morals, in esthetics, in political economy; but the Codes have inspired its fear. It has left the law to the jurists, ? the mine to the miners. Has it recoiled, I know not why, from the special studies which the development of that new vein would demand? Or is there between the juridical and the philosophic spirit a certain incompatibility of nature? Be that as it may, this surrender of the legal field to mere day- 1 This passage is from the Introduction and Chapter...