28 April 1808

§.4.

I. Reasons for the Work

§.4. demand the sole instrument

§.4. The instrument of demand is the only one that requires details: of the instrument of defence the substance being contained in the instrument of demand: and no ulterior instruments necessary.

1. If, in the instrument of demand, be contained, as they might be and ought to be, all possible official causes of defence - i.e. all that the law admitts of, there remains nothing more for the defendant than to affirm the existence of some one or more of the efficient causes of defence (events or states of things having an ablative effect with relation to the demandant's supposed right) the existence of which has been disaffirmed in and by the instrument of demand. But by being disaffirmed, they have already been designated. Thus whatsoever matter is capable of being inserted with propriety into the instrument of defence, is already contained in the instrument of demand: with no other difference than what algebraists would call that of the sign: the sign being in the instrument of demand, negative; in the instrument of defence, positive.

{And so vice versâ. For the defence may consist either in the affirmance of an ablative incident disaffirmed by the demandant, or in the disaffirmance of the collative incident affirmed by him.}

2. This being the case, all use and place for any ulterior instrument of allegation may be seen to stand excluded. For when the instrument of defence has been produced, a proposition or a string of propositions has been brought to view, as being the subject of unqualified affirmance on the one part, of unqualified disaffirmance on the other: i.e. (to use a phrase which, though bred in the technical part, has become current in the main body of the language -) the parties are already at issue.