The "Science" of Legal Science: The Model of the Natural Sciences in Nineteenth-Century American Legal Education

HOWARD SCHWEBER

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a model of legal education called "legal science" became prominent in American universities. The idea of teaching law as a science was not new in American education. In 1823 Timothy Dwight wrote that Tapping Reeve, at Litchfield, taught law "as a science, and not merely nor principally as a mechanical business; nor as a collection of loose independent fragments, but as a regular well-compacted system." 1 Dwight, however, used "science" in its older sense of an organized body of knowledge rather than in its emergent sense as a method characteristic of the study of nature. 2 Similarly, James Kent 3 and Joseph Story, 4 Francis Hilliard, 5 and Silas Jones 6 all thought of themselves as approaching law as a science, but what they meant was that law was an outgrowth of the moral sciences. This article has a different focus: a version of American legal science that looked to the natural sciences for its metaphors, its methods, and its legitimating claims. Writers in this school asserted that the study of law represented an extension of the methods and reasoning of scientific investigation, and claimed for their project all the promise that model entailed. This "natural legal science" was to be profoundly influential, not least because it would provide the vocabulary for Christopher Columbus Langdell, who resolutely insisted that his study was a form of natural—as opposed to moral—scientific learning.	1
The American model of law as a natural science was quite different from Continental legal science, as well as from the moral scientific tradition. In Europe, faced with the decline in authority of traditional certainties, rationalist writers such as Leibniz and the Port Royal logicians had earlier undertaken their own project of finding a basis for certain knowledge unconnected to religious presuppositions, including an attempt to deduce principles of law by the application of reason to known axioms. Others, such as Locke and Grotius, appealed to the historical legacy of an initial social contract and a secularized natural law derived from reason. In the eighteenth century, positive doctrines of law as a system of artificial arrangements made the efficient accomplishment of social goods the basis for reordering the system of laws in new and allegedly more rational forms. These three broad streams of jurisprudential thinking—rationalism, historicism, and positivism—culminated in the nineteenth century in debates between the historical jurisprudence of Friedrich von Savigny and the German Pandectists, who sought a restored version of the Roman jus compendium; rationalist deductivists such as Christian Wolff; and Napoleonic proposals for codification championed by writers such as Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut. 7 Each of these approaches contained the claim that they were creating a "science" of law; none, however, drew a connection to the method of the natural sciences.	2
In asserting that their methods were inspired by the natural sciences, antebellum natural legal scientists in America were appropriating the conception of "science" that dominated contemporary public discourse. Discussions of natural science in lyceums, surveys, and journals employed a language that I call "Protestant Baconianism." Closely connected to the religious roots of laissez-faire and grounded in Scottish Common Sense realism, Protestant Baconianism had four outstanding characteristics: a commitment to natural theology, the doctrine that the study of nature proved religious truths; a commitment to a limited form of inductivism that defined science as fundamentally an exercise in taxonomy; a belief in a grand synthesis that bound all forms of knowledge together in a system of analogies; and a claim that science was a public undertaking that would produce moral and political uplift. Protestant Baconianism was not the only way in which researchers in the nineteenth century thought about science. From early on there were scientists whose approach to their work was quite different, and in the years following the Civil War they would come to displace the Bache circle and the philosophy that they represented. 8 Protestant Baconianism, however, constituted the dominant public idea of science among educated elites in the antebellum period. It was that public idea, transmitted through an array of what Alfred S. Konefsky has called "cultural nexes," 9 that was received into the vocabulary of American legal science.	3
In this article I focus on the writings of a number of the more influential legal and natural scientists. Among legal scientists, I discuss David Hoffman (University of Maryland), 10 Daniel Mayes (Transylvania University), 11 David Dudley Field, 12 Simon Greenleaf, 13 Nathan Beverly Tucker (College of William and Mary), 14 and George Sharswood (University of Pennsylvania). 15 Among natural scientists, my focus is on a professional and social circle centered around Alexander Dallas Bache. 16 In the 1840s "the Bache circle" included Bache, geologists Joseph Henry 17 and James D. Dana, the mathematician Benjamin Peirce, chemists Oliver Wolcott Gibbs and John F. Frazier, astronomer Benjamin A. Gould, and Louis Agassiz, a zoologist and naturalist. The group was extremely influential in the creation of national scientific associations, specialized journals, and university-based science education, particularly at Harvard and Yale. A comparison of the institutional roles and vocabularies of these two groups demonstrates close parallels between them, illuminating the version of "science" at work in antebellum legal science.	4
To trace these parallel lines of development, I first discuss the historical roots of both moral and natural American legal science, positing each as a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of the English tradition of historical jurisprudence. I then examine the patterns in the institutional development of scientific and legal education during the antebellum period. My intent is to describe the structural setting that encouraged the appropriation of explanatory models and to show how the vocabulary of Protestant Baconianism dominated those institutional channels of communication. Next, I describe the parallel ways in which the four crucial themes of Protestant Baconianism appeared in both natural and legal scientific writing.	5
Finally, I turn to Langdell's postbellum effort to define a new kind of naturalistic legal science, assembled from the remains of the Protestant Baconian approach, which had fallen out of favor after the Civil War. Crucial elements of this approach were incorporated into the Langdellian case method. As a result it has continued to influence thinking about both legal education and jurisprudence to this day.	6
I. Blackstone and the Roots of American Legal Science
The idea of law as a science has been applied, retrospectively, as far back as Justinian's "Pandects." In its early sense, however, "science" implied no particular method of study, only that a field was one appropriate for the efforts of men of learning. It was only in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that "science" came to mean a challenge to the authority of received dogma, whether religious or political.	7
The application of this emergent idea of science to the study of the English common law tradition began in the seventeenth century with the competing ideas of Coke and Bacon. 18 Bacon was the first to treat law as a subject to be studied in the same manner as the natural sciences; both law and natural science were elements of his grand project, the reformation of knowledge tout court. Despite his status as the founding figure in the English scientific revolution, however, Bacon's ideas about law were not greatly influential in his time. Instead, it was Sir Edward Coke who drew on the idea of the authority of custom and combined it with Aristotelian deductivism to initiate English legal science in the form of "historical jurisprudence." 19	8
Coke's theory was based on the claim that a judge's statements reflected an ordering logic implicit in established legal custom, what Coke called the "artificial perfection of reason" of the common law. 20 Coke's system was thus designed around a hermeneutic principle of historical deductivism that treated the sum of English legal experience as the source for first principles. 21 In the 1700s, Hale and Blackstone developed the idea of historical jurisprudence further. Hale resurrected some of Bacon's prescriptions, particularly the emphasis on external sources and the idea of arrangement in a "digest," 22 but primarily he continued the tradition of Coke. What Hale added to Coke's formulation was an internalist conception of "custom," one that referred to the customs of the law itself rather than seeking congruence between the law and social practice. Hale's idea was not that judges made law, but rather that their actions demonstrated its meaning; 23 the law, in his view, articulated the collective wisdom of the community. 24	9
The idea of common law as its own system of customary practices would be made explicit by Blackstone, who connected the idea to republican political doctrines. 25 Englishmen, said Blackstone, should study common law because only the common law was truly English. A gentleman, in particular, required a knowledge of the common law if he was to display republican virtue and thus protect the freedom of England. Emphasizing the need for a systematic classification of common law rules, Blackstone made the idea of "law as a science" central to his effort in a way that had not been done previously in English legal writing. In addition, he made university education a central element of his system, decrying the lack of formal training in law as an insult to the dignity of the common law. 26 Blackstone's claims on behalf of university legal education were not new, but due to his influence the idea of legal science became connected to the specific project of legal education, rather than simply a way of thinking and talking about law generally. 27	10
As Edmund Burke famously remarked, Blackstone was as popular in America in the eighteenth century as he was in England. Following the Revolution, however, Americans' ardor for the Commentaries began to cool. 28 Blackstone's substitution of the authority of custom for natural law (in Coke) seemed to Jefferson and his fellows an inherently royalist maneuver. 29 James Wilson, for example, found Blackstone "inaccurate, simplistic and reactionary." 30 American legal thinkers quickly began to move away from the model of historical jurisprudence.	11
American writers turned first to Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws was by far the most-cited source of the late 1700s. 31 Montesquieu had argued that laws must be understood from first principles, but that the first principles involved were the physical characteristics of each country and their influences on its inhabitants. This argument suited the American claim of exceptionalism. Based to a considerable degree on the physical fact of free land and, later, a belief in the efficacy of new technologies, 32 the exceptionalist ideal held that the American experience was entirely separate from historical European experience and, hence, from any historically grounded claims of authority. Among republicans such as Jefferson, in particular, it was an article of faith that the new country would be free of the corruption of the old world, a view that combined a powerful element of nostalgia for a mythic, virtuous past with a distinct reformist sense of mission. Education, especially legal education, played an important role in Jefferson's vision; universities were to be "nurseries" for the generation of virtuous leaders. 33 The first attempts to turn Montesquieu's prescription into a program of legal education was carried out by George Wythe, whom Jefferson appointed to a chair in "law and police" at William and Mary College in 1779. 34	12
Wythe was a firm believer in natural law principles and the integral connection between law and civic virtue. He also incorporated important innovations in his approach to legal education, presiding over moot courts, to which he invited the public, and assigning clinical tasks as well as delivering traditional lectures. 35 His readings comprised a long list of classical texts, plus Blackstone's Commentaries; his lectures were based on Bacon's New Abridgment of the Law. 36 At the other end of the political spectrum, in 1794 Alexander Hamilton arranged for the appointment of James Kent, a Federalist politician with ties to John Jay, to a professorship in law at Columbia University. Despite their political differences, from an intellectual perspective Wythe and Kent stand together. 37 No less than Wythe, Kent believed in the republican ideal of legal education, quoting Montesquieu in his opening address. 38 Although both accepted Montesquieu's prescription for a new, uniquely American system, neither was willing to follow the philosopher's admonition to look to the conditions of nature as the starting point for the study of human society. Instead, Wythe and Kent together initiated the strand of American legal thought that sought an Americanized version of the ancient ideal of law as an element of the moral sciences. 39	13
Montesquieu's explanatory focus on natural phenomena was not the only reason that his was not a perfect solution for republican-minded Americans, whether legal conservatives or reformists. Montesquieu mistrusted mass democratic rule, arguing that republican virtues could only be found in small, Florentine-style city-states. Furthermore, his comments were general and of little immediate use in the construction of a legal curriculum. Blackstone remained the starting point for American legal education, but, as time went on, the need to Americanize his doctrines—the project that had been justified by the appeal to Montesquieu in the first instance—was clear.	14
At first there was no effort to replace the old system outright, merely to clean it up a little. In 1803 Wythe's successor, St. George Tucker, published the first American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. Tucker denied outright the claim that English custom held binding force for Americans, giving credence only to those elements of English common law that had been recognized in pre-Revolutionary enactments. Tucker took pains to point out particular examples where Blackstone's version of the English common law did not fit the conditions of America, focusing especially on the all-important law of property. He also excised passages that he viewed as antirepublican. 40 Tucker's version of Blackstone quickly gained favor in American colleges as the preferred textbook for the study of law as a moral science.	15
Beginning in the early 1820s, however, a second, competing strand of American legal science began to appear. This was naturalistic legal science, an approach that resurrected Bacon's and Montesquieu's claims to directly connect study of the natural world to the reformation of law and politics. Thus American legal science began with a double move in relation to Blackstone. First, republican moralists rejected the authority of custom in favor of the search for natural principles of morality and justice. Second, writers following the lead of Hoffman and Greenleaf rejected the entire line of English jurisprudential development, reaching back for their inspiration to the Baconian model of inductive natural science.	16
To see how the idea of law as a natural science arose, and to understand the influence that the appropriation of models from the natural sciences continues to exert to this day, it is important to first recognize the parallels in the growth of institutions of American legal and scientific education in the antebellum period. The next section is a brief outline of those respective institutional stories.	17
II. Institutional Developments and the Vocabulary of Legal and Natural Scientific Education
During the antebellum period, university-based education in law and the natural sciences were each part of a two-stage process of institutional development, common among the professions, that can be called "separation upward" and "turning inward." 41 "Separation upward" refers to the attempts by practitioners of a craft to conceive of and present themselves as a meritorious elite, deserving of social status by virtue of their work. In terms of education, this meant that programs were supported by an appeal to a norm of improvement, the moral uplift of the students, and the elevation of society at large. The later stage of turning inward involved the creation of institutional gatekeeping mechanisms, a shift to an internalistic discourse, and a separation of practitioners from involvement in public affairs.	18
Within the movements for both legal and scientific education there was tension between those who appealed to the republican ideal of personal and social improvement and those who asserted a liberal claim of utility. In legal education, this opposition appeared in the differences between legal scientists, moral and natural, and writers whose curricula and teaching methods were designed to produce practicing lawyers; examples of the latter include Benjamin Butler 42 and Thomas Cooley. 43 In the natural sciences, the idea of utility was captured in 1829 by the coining of the word "technology," defined as "arts ... which involve applications of science, and which may be considered useful, by promoting the benefit of society together with the emolument of those who pursue them." 44 The republican ideal of improvement, on the other hand, was the province of the Bache circle and their allies. Each of these opposing conceptions would become a guiding principle for institutional developments in American universities in both law and science. 45	19
During the period of separation upward, practitioners of law and science whose goal was the improvement of society encouraged the mutual appropriation of explanatory models explicitly by claims of elite status in the larger society and implicitly by mutual participation in each other's affairs. Students of natural history deserved to be heard on matters of theology and lawyers on questions of chemistry, they argued, because of a shared position of membership in the meritorious elite class of society. In the later stages of professionalization the capacity for borrowing would diminish, as the turn inward diminished contact between participants in the enterprise and outsiders.	20
For the American natural sciences, this is the story of the move from local lyceum to national community, from national community to professional association, from professional association to university department. American members of the social elite had demonstrated an interest in natural science from the time of settlement 46 and throughout the eighteenth century. 47 Lyceums were organizations of gentlemen (the gender-specific term is intentional) 48 for whom an interest in science was both a sign of and a means toward elite status, as it had traditionally been in Europe. 49 Lawyers, along with clergymen and physicians, were among the most prominent members of the lyceums and took a number of the earliest university appointments in science. 50 The primary topics of interest for the lyceums through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fell into two categories: natural history—exemplified by geology and paleontology—and natural science, especially astronomy, botany, and zoology. 51 These were the fields that established the model from which legal science drew its inspiration; it is striking, for example, that there is no mention of Newtonian mechanics in any of the American legal science texts. 52	21
In the Jacksonian period, the number and scope of the lyceums increased to a scale unknown in earlier eras. Gentlemen amateurs all over the country came together in associations to hear presentations on all manner of observations and to discuss the self-conscious project of creating an educated elite. 53 As settlement spread west, so did the impulse for civilization and status. Between 1818 and 1860 thirteen institutes of scientific advancement were established in the Midwest, in addition to the Indiana town of New Harmony and the university museum at Ann Arbor. 54	22
As in earlier eras, lawyers were prominent participants in the new lyceums. Probably the single most important figure in the emergence of the Jacksonian lyceum movement was the lawyer and chemist Benjamin Silliman. Silliman was the first professor of chemistry at Yale, one of the founders of the Yale medical school, and founder of the American Journal of Science. The appearance of "Silliman's Journal," as it was known, was a critical step in the move from local associations to a national community of interest. The American Journal of Science, in fact, nicely illustrates the two stages of development in antebellum American science. Initially, the journal carried everything from popular speculations to the most advanced work in various fields, often presented cheek-by-jowl. In time, however, it came to be identified as a journal for scientific specialists. In 1846 a rival, Scientific American, emerged to take its place as the journal of the lyceum community. By the 1860s the American Journal of Science had a circulation of barely over a thousand, while Scientific American had 40,000 subscribers. 55	23
The growth of lyceums was the direct result of their emphatically public character.	24
Science has now left her retreats ... her selected company of votaries, and with familiar tone begun the work of instructing the race.... through the press, discoveries and theories, once the monopoly of philosophers, have become the property of the multitudes.... Science, once the greatest of distinctions, is becoming popular. 56
The popularity of these scientific associations is difficult to overstate. For example the Lowell Institute, "America's most famous lyceum," inaugurated its lecture series with twelve lectures on geology by Silliman in 1839: "the rush for free tickets broke windows at the place of distribution, and thousands were turned away." 57
One result of such popularity was that theories that required new terminology and study were received with suspicion by the gentlemen amateurs who were most invested in the ideal of public science. This reaction provoked increasing resentment from professional scientific researchers restive under the constraints of explaining their projects to an untrained public. As early as 1819 the chemist Robert Hare wrote to Silliman: "I was told ... that many said they could not understand my memoir, who considered their standing such as to feel as if this were an imputation against me rather than themselves.... there is our difficulty—we cannot write anything for the scientific few which will be agreeable to the ignorant many." 58 The frustration continued: William Rogers, at the time the state geologist of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, vented his frustration in a letter to his brother in 1838. "How can these gentlemen pretend to judge my reports? ... [T]he thought of a legislative body employing itself in venting spleen or exercising wit upon a paper of which but few of them have any adequate comprehension really fills me with indignation." 59	25
Hare's and Rogers's comments evoke many of the concerns of the Bache circle. In 1838, stung by European disrespect for American science, and by the obvious inferiority of American scientific education to that of England and Germany, Henry wrote to Bache: "I am now more than ever of your opinion that the real working men in the way of science in this country should make common cause ... to raise their own scientific character." 60 This was a call for something different from a lyceum; Henry was specifically inspired by his examination of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, itself established as a professional alternative to the Royal Society. The dissatisfaction of American scientists culminated in the formation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).	26
The AAAS was founded in 1848 as the successor organization to a society for survey geologists (the American Geological Society) that had been created by Edward Hitchcock eight years earlier. As its title indicated, the mission of the AAAS was the advancement, rather than the public dissemination, of scientific knowledge; this decisively set the AAAS apart from the lyceum tradition. 61 It was at this stage that the Bache circle came to the forefront of American science. From 1849 on the presidents of the AAAS were, in order, Henry, Bache, Agassiz, Peirce, and Dana.	27
The members of the Bache circle used their position in the AAAS as well as their university appointments to promote university education in science. Their power over university science was sometimes exaggerated, as when an 1858 New York Times editorial spoke of "a notorious society which boasts of its control over every scientific appointment of value in the country." 62 Nonetheless, their influence was considerable. Dana (assisted by his father-in-law Silliman) helped design Yale's science curriculum and led the creation of the Sheffield Scientific School in 1846. Peirce was responsible for reworking science curricula at Harvard as well as the founding in 1849 of the Lawrence School of Science, a separate and parallel program to the regular university. The main immediate purpose of the Lawrence School, in turn, was to create a position to attract Louis Agassiz to Harvard. 63 Agassiz may have been the greatest institution builder, publicist, and fundraiser for science this nation has ever known. He gave regular public lectures to huge, adoring crowds, and between 1853 and 1860 he raised an astounding $500,000 for the creation of the museum of comparative zoology that bears his name. 64 The Bache circle were also close associates of some of the leading figures in the emerging social sciences, particularly Francis Lieber 65 and Daniel Coit Gilman. 66	28
Through the 1850s the AAAS increasingly became the province of professional "scientists," a word that had been coined in 1841 by the astronomer, logician, and natural theologian William Whewell. 67 For the members of the Bache circle, however, the gatekeeping role of the AAAS worked only in one direction. Amateurs would be excluded from their working sessions, and university programs would have strict, German-style requirements for admission and graduation. But they themselves frequently published articles in nonscientific journals, especially journals of theology. Thus, even as the Bache circle jealously guarded their gates against outside intrusion, they presided over the creation of channels for the dissemination of their particular model of the natural sciences. It was not until after the Civil War, with the displacement of the Bache circle from their position of leadership in the AAAS, that the natural scientific establishment cut itself off from participation in public discussions of nonscientific issues.	29
The institutional development of American legal education through the end of the 1850s displayed the same two-step pattern of separation upward and turning inward and the same tension between appeals to utility and improvement. The growth in institutions of legal education was closely connected to the growth in formal institutions of the bar generally. 68 The legal profession, in general, developed an increasing degree of institutional self-awareness, exemplified in the proliferation of new independent legal journals (most of them short-lived) and law reviews. 69	30
Both moral and natural legal science fell squarely on the side of improvement in their support of university-based legal training. Greenleaf and Story typify the simultaneous institutional cooperation and intellectual competition between the two strands of American legal scientific thinking. Story's idea of legal science was little more than an emphasis on system combined with an antipositivist conception of the meaning of law, exemplified in his famous opinion in Swift v. Tyson. 70 Greenleaf was an early important writer in the tradition of law as a form of natural science. The philosophical differences between the two were reflected in their teaching styles. Story was famous for his eloquence, while Greenleaf was revered for his meticulous, careful parsing of legal materials. 71 Despite these differences, the two men, close friends as well as colleagues, were credited with building the Harvard Law School together. In the words of an article in the Law Reporter, "Story prepared the soil, and Greenleaf sowed the seed." 72	31
One point of difference between Story and Greenleaf, and between moral and natural legal science generally, turned on the question of reform that had divided the project of Bacon from that of Coke two centuries earlier. Legal conservatives such as Kent and Story 73 resisted suggestions that the common law required significant revision. The Jacksonian era was full of calls for radical change in the legal system. For instance, in 1839 the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review proposed to do away with all existing laws in favor of a return to pure trial by jury, "the natural progenitor of democratic government." 74 But the influence of these attitudes over the organization of the American bar was marginal, and their influence on legal education even less.	32
The writers who initiated the tradition of law as a form of natural science, on the other hand, aspired to wholesale reform of the law. The first and perhaps the greatest of these writers was Hoffman, who in 1817 began the turn from moral to natural philosophy with the first of several editions of his Outline of Courses. Twenty years after its first publication, the editors of the influential Whig journal North American Review said : "If we were called upon to designate any single work, which had exercised a greater influence over the profession of the law in this country than all others ... we should unhesitatingly select Hoffman's 'Course of Legal Study.'" 75	33
Hoffman's work was not radical in its legal doctrines. What made it innovative, in addition to references to inductive science as the model for study, was its curriculum. Recognizing that not every prospective lawyer would have the time or patience for the complete version, Hoffman conveniently identified the works that should be incorporated into a four-year and a two-year version. Comparing these reveals Hoffman's ranking of core, secondary, and tertiary texts in the presentation of his philosophy of legal science. This is extremely helpful to a modern reader, since Hoffman's tendency to provide glowing accounts of the virtues of all his assigned texts could otherwise give the mistaken impression that each was as central to his enterprise as every other. Hoffman's core texts were the Bible, Cicero's Offices, Beattie's Elements of Moral Science, Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, Reid's Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind, and his own Legal Outlines. His list of secondary and tertiary texts was extensive. 76	34
Even the shortest of Hoffman's courses was intended to be more than simply training for professional practice:	35
Should there be any (which we trust will never be the case) who will be content to glean a few works from the first and second Titles only of this volume, they may assume the name of DUPONDII, or students of small consideration, from the most common coin known in the Roman Empire, of the value of a penny sterling. Such Elementary attainments may sometimes pass them to the Bar; but as they have scarce attained "ad limina legitimae scientiae," they will never reap the honours of those "qui juris nodos, legumque aenigmata solvunt." 77
The theme was echoed in 1834 by Mayes, who spoke of those who viewed law solely as a profession as "standing in the same relation to law, that the cook does to chemistry." 78 A reformist emphasis was implicit in the use of naturalistic metaphors. The American Jurist and Law Magazine characterized the common law in 1823 as "[a] dark forest, where the most intrepid lawyer never thinks of exploring beyond the margin," a "territory" that must be "surveyed and laid out anew ... to let in a little light." 79
Just as the key issues in natural science had to do less with subject matter than with method, so, too, legal scientists were most concerned with modes of thinking about the law rather than with particular points of legal doctrine. Hoffman's work extended the line initiated by the turn to Montesquieu, treating legal science as the study of a natural phenomenon whose history was to be studied not for its authority but as evidence of its character. The study of law, in this model, went beyond the study of the nation it served to the scientific observation of the nature of humanity in general. Hoffman, for example, wrote of "the day approaching when the world may know but one homogeneous system of constitutions, laws, science, literature, and manners; and when morals, and even religion, shall so harmonize with the highest intellectual attainments, as to elevate our species far beyond the conceptions even of poets, or the imaginations of philosophers in their ideal republics." 80	36
The other natural legal scientists followed Hoffman in his universalism. Greenleaf encouraged comparative study, drawing on the model of "the comparative anatomy of a sister profession;" the results of that study were to be couched in universal truths of human nature expressed in principles of law. 81 Mayes said of law, "Man being its subject, and his happiness its object, its rules must necessarily be framed, in direct reference to his nature." Like Greenleaf, Mayes spoke of the need to study various nations, but always with the recognition that men's membership in a society left "their natures unchanged, their private social relations unaltered." 82 Sharswood called for students to begin with "the principles of general jurisprudence, apart from the peculiarities of any particular system." 83	37
Furthermore, legal science sought to take its place not merely as one among others, but as the highest of all the sciences. The reason, said Field, was simple: the subject matter of legal science was not a special field of professional activity, but rather the underlying significance of human civilization writ large.	38
Compare this science with any of the other sciences; with those which are esteemed the greatest in extent, and the most exalted in subject. Take even astronomy, that noble science.... Sublime as this science is, it is but the science of inanimate matter, and a few natural laws; while the science which is the subject of our discourse governs the actions of human beings, intelligent and immortal, penetrates into the secrets of their souls, subdues their wills, and adapts itself to the endless variety of their wants, motives and conditions. 84
Mayes declared that Man was to be "contemplated in every aspect in which he is found to exist, and in all the diversified relations which he bears to the persons and things, by which he is surrounded." 85
The constant references to the study of history and the laws of other nations reflected the natural scientific tradition of the time. Natural history was governed by pre-Darwinian evolutionary concepts of progress through ascending stages of development. 86 Legal scientists arrived at the same working premise by their appropriation of natural scientific models of understanding; in this way, in fact, antebellum American legal science presages American social science of the late nineteenth century. 87	39
As a result of its immense scope and importance, the study of law demanded the highest of standards and the most developed of methods.	40
If, in the common concerns of life, and in our studies generally, method is of so great importance, there surely is no department of knowledge in which it is so imperiously requisite as in the science of jurisprudence.... He who aspires to a thorough acquaintance with legal science, should cultivate the most enlarged ideas of its transcendent dignity, its vital importance, its boundless extent, and infinite variety. 88
That law was an exceptionally difficult science was also a common theme among legal educators. "Law is a science simple in its elements ... yet the stores of its learning, are so inexhaustible, that ... much time and laborious study is indispensable to him, who would possess himself of all its treasures." 89 Sharswood complained that his students, eager to become lawyers, were unwilling to devote the time required to master their subject. "It is the characteristic of the youth of our country that they press too earnestly to enter early upon the arena of action ... An apprenticeship of five or seven years is not deemed too long to learn a mechanical occupation, a period of two or three years is all that is allowed to make a lawyer." 90
Those who developed the vocabulary of natural legal science did so from a position that was in many ways strikingly similar to that of the Bache circle: both groups were strong proponents of university-based education in their fields; both appealed, against resistance, to the promise of improvement and reform; both devised their vocabularies to reach a public audience, resting on the broadest possible considerations of the nature of humanity and the world. Both, finally, were built on the set of premises that I have called Protestant Baconianism. In the following section I examine in more detail the very close parallels in the governing concepts—the thinking about thinking—that informed naturalistic legal science and the natural sciences of the Bache circle through the 1840s and 1850s.	41
III. Natural and Legal Science, 1820-1871: Protestant Baconianism and the Language of the Elites.
Because Bacon's ideas about the study of the natural sciences figure prominently in this account, it is appropriate to review the basic elements of his method. Bacon saw his task as overcoming the weight of traditional authority so as to make room for new methods of understanding. 91 Above all, this meant a rejection of the Aristotelian (or the Peripatetic gloss on the Aristotelian) idea of deductivism and its replacement by a system of inductive reasoning. 92 "The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols." 93	42
For the study of nature, this required immersion into the world without preconceived first principles: "[W]e must entreat men again and again to discard ... these volatile and preposterous philosophies, which have preferred theses to hypotheses, held experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God." 94 Mere observation would not suffice, however, as human perceptions were "false mirrors" that yielded false analogies and misleading correspondences. 95 Bacon called for an experimental method, one that study Nature "vexed ... forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded." Laboratory science, not natural history or the classification of forms, was the key to scientific progress. 96	43
These elements differentiated Baconian inductivism sharply from the older deductive systems and from the studies of mathematics or logic. "The art which I introduce ... differs from [traditional logic] in three points especially—viz., in the end aimed at, in the order of demonstration, and in the starting point of the inquiry." 97 Bacon's program involved unfettered induction, experimentation, and the reduction of forms to substances. Lyceum science in the Jacksonian era preached an approach to scientific investigation that claimed the mantle of Baconianism, but the approach shared none of these characteristics. Instead, it employed Protestant Baconianism, a melding of Bacon's scientific method with the theology and epistemology of Scottish Common Sense.	44
Common Sense was the creation of Thomas Reid, a professor of morals at the University of Edinburgh, as a response to the epistemological skepticism of Locke and Hume. Locke and Hume had challenged the claim that inductive reasoning could "prove" anything. Locke commented that induction from experience "may provide us convenience, not science." 98 In response to this skepticism, Reid formulated the idea of induction undertaken within the confines of known first principles. He argued that the experience of perception itself provided a certainty from which true knowledge could be ascertained. Since everyone shared in this experience of perception, Reid called it "Common Sense."	45
This was little more than a revival of the Aristotelian nous or the Cartesian cogito, but Reid's formulation added two crucial points. First, Reid argued that the experience of perception contained within it the experience of faith in the veracity of that perception and, consequently, a proof of the validity of scripture. "[W]hen I perceive a tree before me, my faculty of seeing gives me not only a notion of simple apprehension of the tree, but a belief of its existence ... and this judgment or belief is not got by comparing ideas, it is included in the very nature of the perception." 99 Since belief was an essential element of perception, reasoned Reid, the truths of Christianity were as self-evident as the presence of a tree. Second, by emphasizing the common—what might be called the "public"—character of perception, Reid restored the accessibility of true knowledge of the physical world.	46
Reid's ideas were further developed by his students James Beattie and Dugald Stewart. The names Reid, Beattie, and Stewart are familiar to any student of nineteenth-century American history; they were the patron saints of laissez-faire, cited with monotonous regularity as the philosophers who had proved that nature dictated the ideal form of political economy. The importation of Common Sense to America, however, had been motivated not by economic policy but by a crisis in religious doctrine. Since the Great Awakening of 1740, the American Protestant denominations had been split between Calvinist rationalism and enthusiastic, literalist evangelicals. By the 1760s many denominations were in crisis. In 1768, responding to the division in their ranks, the Presbyterian Church invited John Witherspoon to take over the leadership of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Witherspoon, a leading figure in the Scottish Presbyterian Church and a professor of divinity at Edinburgh, 100 used Common Sense to resolve the differences within the faith by connecting scriptural and natural study, based on the bedrock Calvinist doctrine that nature represented a "second book of revelation." Witherspoon and his successor, Samuel Stanhope Smith, transformed the college, and Common Sense spread rapidly in American universities. 101	47
Common Sense provided the axiomatic truths of laissez-faire political economics, which used Common Sense to equate "natural" with "morally preferable," manipulating Adam Smith's theories of the market to continue the connection to economics. It also inspired a dramatic increase in religious interest in natural science, especially among evangelicals. Theological journals were packed with articles discussing natural proofs of miracles and other uses of natural study for religious uplift. As a result, the combination of Common Sense and Baconian science quickly became the dominant vocabulary of public science.	48
By the 1820s, evangelical Protestants had raised Protestant Baconianism to an art form. Ministers became some of the most enthusiastic participants in public discussions of science, while the lyceums themselves were intensely involved in questions of natural theology. Protestant Baconianism was also strongly reflected in the naturalistic strand of American legal science from the 1820s to the 1870s. To appreciate the parallels between the vocabularies of natural science and legal science, it is worthwhile looking at each of the four major themes of Protestant Baconianism in turn.	49
Natural Theology
Natural theology—exemplified in William Paley's 1802 Natural Theology and the Bridgewater Treatises—was required reading in most American colleges. 102 The orthodox position was declared by Samuel Tyler: "the more Baconian philosophy has been cultivated, the more has natural theology advanced." 103 The connection between science and natural theology was the grounding principle of much of American public science. For example, the Lowell Institute in Boston was created in 1836 when textiles manufacturer John Lowell left half of his considerable estate to create public lectures "principally on evidence in support of Christianity and on various scientific subjects." A typical example was Francis Bowen's 1848 lecture on "Application of Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion." 104	50
The Lowell Lectures were the most famous, but far from an atypical, example of the religious mandate of respectable public science in the tradition of Protestant Baconianism. Edward Hitchcock was perhaps the exemplar of the scientist as natural theologian. The most prominent surveyor of his day, he held a chair in geology and natural theology at Amherst, had been trained as a Congregationalist minister, and had studied chemistry with Silliman at Yale. Hitchcock devoted a large part of his career to presenting "evidences" of God in nature, depending for his proof on both biblical citations and detailed analogies, such as one between the seasons of the year and the attributes of God, or another analogizing the doctrine of resurrection to the metamorphosis of insects, a phenomenon that "many able writers on natural theology have considered as direct proof of future resurrection." 105	51
When writers dared to suggest that science contradicted religion, they were treated as vulgar and unlearned. The most prominent case was Robert Chambers's popular and controversial 1844 book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chambers combined prevalent evolutionary notions 106 and Laplace's nebular hypothesis for planetary creation 107 and concluded that the emergence of life could be explained by a universal law of progressive development. While this concept by itself was neither unusual nor incommensurable with Christian doctrine, Chambers took pains to push the point beyond the limits of acceptable religious principle, describing the creation of life as an electrochemical accident and the emergence of higher forms as the result of transmutation and spontaneous generation, events neither requiring nor confirming miraculous accounts. The book was published anonymously, but the mere suspicion that Chambers had written it was sufficient to cause him considerable public embarrassment. 108	52
The commitment to natural theology among the members of the Bache circle was strong. No one more completely embodied this than Agassiz, who by the late 1850s was the most famous member of the Bache circle. "A Thought of a Supreme Intelligence manifested in material reality; that is the view I take of the animal kingdom," was his statement of the matter in 1849. 109 "[R]elations and proportions which exist throughout the animal and vegetable world have an intellectual, and ideal connection in the mind of the Creator, matured in his thought, before it was manifested in tangible forms." 110 "We must acknowledge that the diversity among animals is a fact determined by the will of the Creator, and their geographical distribution part of the general plan which unites all organized beings into one great organic conception." 111 Others shared Agassiz's convictions. In an 1856 article in The American Journal of Education, Dana referred to science as "the handmaiden of theology." 112 Benjamin Peirce read Laplace's Celestial Mechanics and, far from finding encouragement for Chambers's materialism, found the entire text a "vast teleological argument." 113	53
In legal scientific writings, natural theology was equally a grounding principle of justification and explanation in the study of law. 114 Hoffman, in particular, displayed close connections to the thinking of men like Hitchcock, Silliman, and Peirce. The very first entry in his Course of Legal Study is on the Bible. His discussion of the importance of scripture contains a declaration of the connection between religion, law, and the study of nature.	54
(Note 1.) THE BIBLE.—The Bible forms a very natural introduction to this Course, as recording a form of government and law originating in the great Legislator of the universe; whose pleasure it was to enjoin, by a direct communication of his will, those duties, and declare those obligations which, when by reasoning on the nature and relations of man, we have concluded to be such, we consider as the dictates of nature. 115
Hoffman also relied on the Bible to define his position in relation to the scientific controversies of the day. "The Bible," he wrote, "affords the only authentic history of the origin and multiplication of mankind." 116 A nineteenth-century reader could not have missed this reference to the human origins question. Hoffman here forthrightly declared an allegiance between the study of law and natural theology against encroaching atheistic empiricism. The opposing principle to empiricism, in the jargon of nineteenth-century science, was inductivism in the service of religion, the basis for natural theology and the hallmark of Protestant Baconianism. This connected closely with the Bible's most important role as the moral heart of the law. "[I]t is the foundation of the common law of every Christian nation. The Christian religion is a part of the law of the land, and, as such, should certainly receive no inconsiderable portion of the lawyer's attention." 117
Simon Greenleaf's approach was less systematic, but his fervor for the cause of natural theology was no less than Hoffman's:	55
We are therefore required by the strongest motives,—by personal interest, by the ties of kindred and friendship, by the claims of patriotism and philanthropy, to examine, and that not lightly, the evidences on which Christianity challenges our belief, and the degree of credit to which they are entitled. The Christian religion is part of our common law, with the very texture of which it is interwoven.... 118
The word "evidences," again, would be unmistakable to a listener of the 1830s, a direct reference to the claim that the study of nature demonstrated the truths of Christian dogma. Greenleaf, in fact, not only wrote an authoritative treatise on the law of evidence that went through eleven editions between 1842 and 1899 (not including a two-volume edition in 1866), but also produced a separate volume proving the truth of biblical accounts by application of legal standards of evidence. 119
Nathan Beverly Tucker likewise made Christian education and the call to moral action a central tenet of his legal teaching, in sharp contrast to his father's conservative approach. 120 Field appealed to Christian chivalry as a historical phenomenon, asserting that to it Americans owed "[t]he best part of our law of personal rights." 121 Sharswood not only appealed to the moral authority of the Bible, but also to the specific implications of nature for the proposition that "[t]rue conservatism is gradualism." "The world, neither physically, intellectually nor morally, was made to stand still. As in her daily revolutions on her own axis, as well as her annual orbit around the sun, she never returns precisely to the same point in space which she has ever before occupied, it would seem to be the lesson the Great Creator would most deeply impress upon mind, as He has written it upon matter: 'By ceaseless motion all that is, subsists.'" 122	56
None of the other legal scientists discussed here were so overtly theistic in their beliefs. In part this may have been because the religious controversies of the time were naturalistic rather than legalistic. In the early 1800s religious journals were filled with articles about geology and the creation of mankind, not with debates over the religious basis for political authority as we can imagine they would have been in, say, the 1600s. 123 As we have seen, however, the natural sciences from which legal writers drew their inspiration were suffused with the language of biblicism, and even writers who did not acknowledge or understand the debt that their concept of "science" owed to Protestant doctrine clung tenaciously to the methodological tenets of that theology.	57
Bounded Inductivism
The second identifying feature of the scientific thought of the gentlemen who ran lyceums and conducted surveys was an adherence to the highest values of "Baconianism." "[A]t the present day," wrote Edward Everett, editor of the North American Review in 1823, "as is well known, the Baconian philosophy has become synonymous with the true philosophy." 124 As noted earlier, this was a particular version of Bacon's philosophy built around the requirements of Protestant theology, as John Brazer's 1835 Dudleian Lecture made clear:	58
[T]hat a being, whom we call God, or Deity, exists, is a proposition to be proved, in the same way as the proposition that a certain law of relative forces reigns among the orbs of the planetary system;—namely, by that great organ or instrument of inquiry called the inductive process of reasoning; whose principles were first fully developed by Lord Bacon.... 125
The relentless emphases on observation and the avoidance of hypotheses led many of these "Baconians" to reject the idea of formulating theoretical explanations for natural phenomena at all. This, scientific writers insisted, was the epitome of the inductive method of study in the natural sciences. 126
The reason for this peculiarly constrained conception of inductivism was straightforward: inductive examinations of evidence always took place in the context of known, given first principles. To dabble in explanatory theories—to speculate about the logic that connected the observations that one recorded—was the basic element of Bacon's inductive science, but it was anathema to the Protestant Baconianism, as William Stanhope Smith explained in 1815. "[T]he extreme refinements of reason, which arise from the natural ambition of human pride, to extend its authority beyond its proper sphere, always tend to dogmatical error in bold and ardent minds, or to the cold indifference of skepticism, in minds of the opposite character." 127 This, in Herbert Hovenkamp's words, was "scientific Antinomianism": "To extreme Baconians, terms like 'theory' and 'law' were part of metaphysics, not of true science." 128	59
The commitment to limiting the "extremes of reason" is the sharpest mark of a distinction between this kind of constrained inductivism and deductive logic. The job of the good Protestant was to observe facts and record them, not to derive axiomatic principles from logical reasoning. As a good Protestant, moreover, there was no need to wait for these observations to yield laws of general applicability, since these had been prescribed a priori in scripture. All that required explanation was the how of the obvious fact that scriptural laws dictated the pattern of observations. Translated into practice, this meant that the work of the natural scientist was taxonomy; the hallmark of Protestant Baconianism was the survey of forms and their compilation into catalogues.	60
This constrained form of inductivism-to-known-principles was a notable element of natural legal science. Simon Greenleaf called for a rejection of "bold empiricism and noisy declamation" in favor of "argument and reason." 129 The first lesson that Greenleaf drew from this imperative was the need to study history—not, however, to invoke Blackstone's (or Savigny's) authority of historically validated custom, but rather to find universal and natural governing principles for human affairs. 130 Other writers, following Bacon, looked to "the nature of man" as their starting point for evidence of first principles. Hoffman based his recommendation of classical works on the rationale that "we assume it as undeniable that pure Ethics and Natural Law lie at the very foundation of all laws. The original principles of law, as a science, are to be found in the moral nature of man...." 131 Daniel Mayes, referring to Lord Bacon as "the prince of philosophers and light of the bar," 132 argued that the study of history would yield an understanding of the nature of man, which would in turn yield principles that—in a complex system of combinations and recombinations—would demonstrate the proper form of every legal rule. 133	61
Sharswood, who cited Bacon more than any other writer, described the Law of Nature as "those rules of conduct for man which result from his nature and relations, whether discovered by the unassisted exercise of reason, or made known through the medium of a direct revelation." He examined the history and prehistory of the human condition and from that concluded that "government is an institution which necessarily grows out of the relations of men, and [is] therefore ... an ordinance of God." These elements, he wrote, defined the study of jurisprudence that underlay knowledge of the laws of any particular country. 134 Only where the dual guides of reason and revelation provided no principle did law become a positivistic exercise in authority. Referring, for example, to differences in the form of governments, he declared, "It follows from the mere silence of scripture and nature on this subject, that it is left free to the determination of those to whom the general command is given." 135	62
Beverly Tucker was an interesting case. Like his father, Tucker began with Blackstone, but where Blackstone started with general topics (the origins of political and individual rights) and then worked his way down to the minutiae of legal practice, Tucker reversed the process, deriving principles from the examination of particular cases. He justified this approach with the observation that as laws are elements of the social environment, their particulars are apparent as natural objects, elements of the environment rather than constructed principles. "[B]eing, in point of fact, born in the midst of law, habituated to it from our infancy ... we learn to regard it as a thing in rerum natura, rather than of human invention; a sort of moral atmosphere, which, like that we breathe, seems a very condition of our existence." 136 Tucker's characterization of his approach is confusing to modern ears. He distinguished between philosophical analysis, "by which the different parts of a subject are so arranged, as to exhibit in distinct groups those things that depend on the same or like principles," and logical analysis, "by which different propositions are so arranged, as that no one of them shall ever be brought under consideration, until all others which may be necessary to the right understanding of that one, have been established and explained." 137	63
The crucial point to recognize in these descriptions is that they are not deductive: none of the systems described above propose moving from given axioms to construct or derive particular rules from the exercise of reason. Hoffman used the idea of laws of nature precisely to draw the connection between induction and religious first principles. "[T]o the man of piety, it may be a matter of edification ... to observe how nearly the rules discovered by reason and experience, as most conducive to the happiness of our present state, coincide with those precepts which are given in the Gospel, in order to fit us for a better [world.]" 138 As David Dudley Field put the matter in 1859, the range of historical evidences was too vast, and the set of principles too complex, to be treated as a mere deductive system.	64
Will you compare it with one of the exact sciences; as, for example, with mathematics? ... But the science of calculation is occupied with a single principle. This may go on to develop more and more, till the mind is almost lost in its immensity; yet the development of that one principle can never reach in extent, comprehensiveness and variety the development of all the principles by which the actions of men toward each other are governed in all their relations. 139
Instead, legal science treated law as a species of natural object, a given element of the world whose historical development was to be examined in order to see how its ordering was consistent with timeless and universal first principles. The very openness of the system to nonlegal sources of explanation emphasized the idea that cases occupied the position of objects to be examined for evidence of their origin—as though books of law had been found resting in the sediment of a streambed—rather than propositions whose validity were to be demonstrated by applications of the rules of the system in which they occurred.
Grand Synthesis and Proof by Analogy
The third element of Protestant Baconianism was a belief in the "grand synthesis," the idea that every field of study informed every other through analogic reasoning. The search for analogies as the source for a grand synthesis was eloquently described in 1852 by Harvard natural historian Thaddeus William Harris. According to his explication of the "Law of Unity": "[A]ll the observations of all the naturalists in all ages seem only to have elucidated this truth, that creation is one; different phenomena, different combinations, different planes, but the same identical law.... [The] work of science is to trace this clew through all modifications." 140 Dana, for example, likened the stable categories of differentiation in biology to the unique weights of elements in the periodic table, describing Nature as a great "temple ... of hewn and measured stones." 141 Peirce presented the attendees at the 1849 AAAS meeting with his discovery that the successive distances between nodes on plant stems were the same as the distance between orbits in the solar system. Agassiz's protégé and future Harvard president Thomas Hill was impressed by Peirce's arguments. In his report on the session he wrote "[t]he study of abstract law ... [leads] to a perception of the great thoughts of God." 142	65
The grand synthesis idea, and its associated analogic mode of reasoning, was also prevalent in legal science, as Hoffman demonstrated with characteristic eloquence:	66
How intimately are all the sciences connected, and how much mistaken is the idea entertained by many in this country, that the lawyer (whose province is reasoning), can attain to eminence, though he restricts his inquiries within the visible boundaries of his peculiar science, chiefly as it is found in the treatises of municipal law. 143
Greenleaf, as noted earlier, declared that to understand the law "[m]an is to be studied in every period of his social existence" and drew a connection between the study of law and "liberal learning." 144 Sharswood used the idea of natural law to connect moral and natural governing principles. "In a more general sense the term Law of Nature may comprise natural as well as moral relations, and in it there is evidently included all natural as well as moral science," extending to knowledge of the laws governing physical objects, rational creatures, "and as far as we can form ideas of them, in God himself." 145
In legal science the ideal of the grand synthesis meant that analogies could be drawn from one area of law to another—from the duties of bailees to the rules governing liability to invited guests, or from contracts to torts—as well as from other areas of human history to the law generally. Hoffman, for example, had earlier quoted Sir William Jones, "than whom no authority is higher":	67
The great science of jurisprudence, like that of the universe, consists of many subordinate systems, all of which are connected by nice links, and beautiful dependencies; and each of them, as I have fully persuaded myself, is reducible to a few plain elements ... If law be a science and really deserve so sublime a name, it must be founded on principle, and claim an exalted rank in the empire of reason.... 146
The same principle also enabled legal scientists to claim theistic authority for their enterprise: "International, constitutional and municipal law are but branches of this great original law, the fountain of all laws," said Sharswood, quoting Hooker and Cicero along with Montesquieu. 147
Improvement
The theme of "improvement" has already been discussed in the context of the institutional claims of universities in both the natural and legal sciences. "To be eminent in our profession," wrote Beverly Tucker, "is to hold a place among the great ones of the earth.... [T]o win its honors, and to wear them worthily, is to attain an elevation from which all other honors are accessible: but to turn aside disgusted with its labors, is to lose this vantage ground, and to sink again to the dead level of the common mass." 148 To the republican conception of the elite that Jefferson had adopted (echoing Blackstone), however, Tucker added an updated, liberal gloss: "You this day put on the toga virilis, and enter on the business of life. This day you commence those studies on which independence, prosperity, respectability, and the comfort and happiness of those who will be dearest to you, must depend...." 149	68
In Greenleaf's classically republican formulation, law would rescue the heroic tradition of the Revolution from corruption. "[I]n later days, when the integrity of that charter has been invaded, its spirit violated, and its language perverted, whether to gratify the mad ambition of one partisan, or the cupidity of many; to whom have all eyes been imploringly directed for its preservation, but to the living and honored champions and expounders of constitutional law?" 150 As for the lawyer, his character "shines with mild but genial lustre." 151 Field echoed Blackstone when he declared that the study of law would elevate "both the head and the heart" of the diligent student. 152 Sharswood, borrowing Jefferson's metaphor, called the law school "the nursery of sound literature and civil liberty." 153	69
The claim of improvement appeared strongly in the legal scientists' emphasis on the connection between legal education and the larger project of teaching moral conduct. Hoffman, for example, recommended the study of the works of Beattie and Paley because, for a lawyer, "next to religion, nothing can be of more value than the science which teaches [Man] to see clearly the principles of his morals, and to define them with as much certainty as belongs to mathematical or physical truths." 154	70
Natural theology, bounded inductivism, grand synthesis, and moral improvement appeared in antebellum American legal science in forms that closely paralleled the contemporaneous dominant tradition in public science. By the 1870s, many of these parallels would break down. A new form of legal science was invented, begun by Langdell at Harvard and eventually destined to dictate the model of a modern law professor. Langdell claimed that his new model had no relation to earlier forms and drew no inspiration from earlier, discredited forms of legal or natural science. That claim was false. Fundamental elements of Protestant Baconianism were incorporated into Langdell's legal science, even as others were discarded. Through his project they became permanent elements of American legal education.	71
IV. Legal and Natural Science in the 1870s: Langdell and the New Legal Science
Like those of earlier writers, Langdell's interpretation of "science" reflected the state of the natural sciences in his time. From the 1830s through the 1860s, a series of scientific controversies—over geologic time, 155 the causes for variations in animal and human forms, and finally Darwinian evolution—rocked the intellectual foundations of Protestant Baconianism in the natural sciences. The members of the Bache circle found themselves committed to a tangled combination of ideas, none of which survived the Civil War with respectability: 156 biblicism, popular participation in science, and anti-Darwinism were all coupled with support for the Southern cause. 157 Some members of the group, such as Gould and Dana, were able to revise their thinking. 158 Others, notably Agassiz, were gradually excluded from participation in discussions in the professional associations and journals.	72
By the end of the 1860s, the model of lyceum science was driven out of the strongholds of the universities and scientific associations that it had helped to create. At Harvard, Asa Gray presided over an institutional turning inward that emphasized internalist discourse, disassociation from public affairs, a rejection of theological and political implications alike, and an emphasis on the value of theoretical rather than practical scientific understanding and on the construction of explanatory theories rather than taxonomies. In 1864 Wyman wrote to a student, "The days of the merely descriptive naturalist have gone by ... the thinking naturalist alone is the one who will command much respect." 159 Taxonomy had been rep