24 June 1805

Evidence

Introd

Ch. Non-Notoriety &c.

''.1. Connection

First as to the things themselves. Take any article of law at pleasure, knowledge of its existence may exist, without any sufficient intellection of /with regard to/ its import, much more without any sufficient certainty in regard to two different imports, which of them is the true one. But all three (it has been seen) are necessary: knowledge therefore of itself is not sufficient.

But though knowledge as above particularized /defined/ is not every thing, neither can it be said to amount to nothing. If it amounted to nothing, a legislative arrangement whereby this object were accomplished and no other would be altogether useless: but this it will be seen is by no means /far from being/ the case. Without any sort of intellection knowledge may of itself seem thus far, that in any one of a variety of ways it may lead to intellection, and thence to certainty. A law is laid upon the windows of certain sort of houses, of which that in which I live is one. I have, no matter how, that for the first time a tax has been laid upon windows. I know enough of the law to know that this new sort of obligation is not of the number of those which can have been imposed in the way of jurisprudential law. I know therefore that it is by some statute and that a new one that it must have been imposed. The statute is enough for me. To know what a window is, to know what paying money is - I know there can not, or at least there ought not to be any need for me to address myself to a man of law. I go at once to a shop, and buy the statute. I read it, and find it, in this part at least, intelligible: for it is not every English statute that is unintelligible, at least in every part of it. I find the import of it even certain: for uncertainty as will be seen is the [...?] and constant attraction of jurisprudential law: of statute law only by accident: and this is statute law.