4. JURISTIC IMPLICATION OF THE RECEPTION
In connection with the reception process described above, it must be remarked that one very important aspect of the difference between the French Civil Code and the German Civil Code was, though rarely noticed, attributable to the spirit of the age.
The French Civil Code was promulgated at the turning point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the German Civil Code appeared roughly 100 years later. The spirit of the former was the product of the jurisprudence of the two preceding centuries, when the great system of natural law was fully developed and embodied in the Napoleonic Code. Law became an articulated, fixed system, with the emphasis on certainty of the law, that is, the spirit of jus strictum. It meant that the spirit of jurisprudence became similar to that of the Renaissance. Law became a machine of logic, ready to be employed by lawyers indiscriminately. Their only role was to press the button of deductive logic and to let the machine automatically work out the prearranged conclusion. Law was in this way divorced from morality.At the end of the nineteenth century, the pendulum of the legal spirit had swung the opposite way. The belief in the perfection of the legal system began to yield to the pursuit of desired purposes and the protection of individual interests. Natural law with changing content was propagated; sociological jurisprudence was invited. The sign of the age pointed clearly to a new spirit of jus aequum. The German Civil Code included some ideas of this spirit in its provisions, for instance, on good faith, public order, good morals, and prohibition of abuse of right (Wang, 1956). A code composed of such substantial elements may truly be called, to use Roscoe Pound's terminology, a “maturity of law” (1926: Ch.l).