8 July 1804

Procedure and Evidence

Evil causes 4th order

5. Anti-merits substantive law

A piece of land - i.e. a pyramid of which the basis is the part in question of the earth's surface, and the apex a point coinciding with the earth's centre, can not (physically speaking) be carried off, nor therefore stolen. But what is predicted of/ true concerning/ a whole(?), may be predicted of each and every of its parts: therefore neither can any part of such estate be stolen: no stone, marble, ore of iron, lead, silver or gold that lies on it: no vegetable, no timber tree that grows in it as well as upon it: for all these things savour of the reality. But that which it is impossible for man to do, man ought not to be punished for: therefore for carrying off any thing that savours of the reality, a man ought not to be punished as for theft.

But no sooner when the attraction of cohesion, by which one part of the contents of the castle is bound to those contiguous to it, is departed, the savour of the reality is gone off from it. Therefore (the lawyers by whom this reason was invented know of no such words as cohesion and attraction - but this is what they meant) in this case /cases of this sort/ a man may steal, and a man may be punished for it.

The same reasoning has been applied to houses and their materials: - the same reasoning, accompanied by the same law. Ahab built a house with ivory: Nero covered a house with gold. Habitable or not, this ivory, this gold, would not have been larcenable.

A piece of parchment, since the atoms that composed it left the form of grass to become parcel of the ship's body, never has been parcel of any reality. But if it did - a form of conveyance bearing relation to a house or a piece of land has been written upon it, it contracts so strong a savour of the reality that it is as impossible to steal it, at least to commit larceny on it, as if it were so much growing grass.