The Metrics of Legal Philosophy (An Old And Rare Book)

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"Legal Science", observed K. G. Wurzel, "would succeed in stopping the principal breach in its ramparts through which uncertainty of the law may enter, if the social forces and value judgments could be transformed into clearly conceived logical formulas of definitely limited in legal effectiveness". This can come about with the utilisation, in legal science, of the concepts of other sciences, since logic and science are mathematical in ideas. Unfortunately, science has remained so long an outsider to law and its philosophy, to society and its politics. There has thus been a long felt need to admit the outsider to legal philosophy. This has been attempted in the present book and mathematical physics has formed its sub-stratum. It is a peculiarity of this outsider to present different appearances to different persons. To a non-mathematician, he is venerable; to a mathematician, he stretches out after the "attainable but unattained".

The book spreads out in 13 sections with an epilogue. Twenty three main equations of social mathematics have been derived on the basis of analogy and induction to get at the chameleon-like legal truth. Juridical truth always eludes one's grasp, since it does neither coincide with historical nor with psychological nor with any other emperical truth, not- withstanding the positive tendency dominant in jurispudence. It has thus often to remain content with the greater social probability and as such it admits of quantum mechnical treatment. And this is attempted in the book. Herein lies the utility of the scientific method, that enables one to live without the delusive support of subjective certainty. As has been rightly pointed out by B. Russell: "It is part of the scientific attitude that the pronouncements of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the most probable on present evidence".

The outsider is a seeker after truth and not a mere formalist. He knows that the universe is empty without matter and is meaningful with it.

In 1690 Christian Huygens wrote: "In true philosophy. we should conceive the cause of all natural phenomena in terms of mechanics-this we must do or for ever renounce the hope of understanding anything of physics". In terms of mechanics, the universe appeared to be a vast machine, turning in a manner so determined that a complete knowledge of its state at a given moment would enable all its future states to be predicted. This is called Determinism, that held its sway until the twentieth century when the theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics challenged the ideas of matter, causality and natural law. The mechanical determinism was best expressed by Laplace in these words: "Given for one instant an inelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it-an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis-it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes." The old concepts have now undergone a progressive blurring and the physicist reversed Huygens' dictum to say that he must renounce all hope of knowing anything of physics until he can express mechanical phenomena in terms of the other branches of physics. Time and space have become too loose a dress for the elementary entities; individuality has attenuated in the process of interaction; and Determinism, the darling of an elder generation of physicists, has been forced to yield.