d obscurity, instead of shutting
them out. And this must always be the case, because words do not
create ideas, but only recall them; and the same word may recall many
different ideas. For this reason, nearly all abstract principles can
be seen by the single mind more clearly than they can be expressed by
words to another. This is owing to the imperfection of language, and
the different senses, meanings, and shades of meaning, which
different individuals attach to the same words, in the same
circumstances.[77]

Where the written law cannot be construed consistently with the
natural, there is no reason why it should ever be enacted at all. It
may, indeed, be sufficiently plain and certain to be easily
understood; but its certainty and plainness are but a poor
compensation for its injustice. Doubtless a law forbidding men to
drink water, on pain of death, might be made so intelligible as to
cut off all discussion as to its meaning; but would the
intelligibleness of such a law be any equivalent for the right to
drink water? The principle is the same in regard to all unjust laws.
Few persons could reasonably feel compensated for the arbitrary
destruction of their rights, by having the order for their
destruction made known beforehand, in terms so distinct and
unequivocal as to admit of neither mistake nor evasion. Yet this is
all the compensation that such laws offer.

Whether, therefore, written laws correspond with, or differ from, the
natural, they are to be condemned. In the first case, they are
useless repetitions, introducing labor and obscurity. In the latter
case, they are positive violations of men's rights.

There would be substantially the same reason in enacting mathematics
by statute, that there is in enacting natural law. Whenever the
natural law is sufficiently certain to all men's minds to justify its
being enacted, it is sufficiently certain to need no enactment. On
the other hand, until it be thus certain, there is danger of doing
injustice by enacting it; it should, therefore, be left open to be
discussed by anybody who may be disposed to question it, and to be
judged of by the proper tribunal, the judiciary.[78]

It is not necessary that legislators should enact natural law in
order that it may be known to the _people_, because that would be
presuming that the legislators already understand