resolution to apply a searching test to every
law. If that test was not so unequivocal or ultimate as he fancied, it
yet implied the constant application of such considerations as must
always carry weight, and, perhaps, be always the dominant
considerations, with the actual legislator or jurist. What is the use of
you? is a question which may fairly be put to every institution and to
every law; and it concerns legislators to find some answer, even though
the meaning of the word 'use' is not so clear as we could wish.

NOTES:

[406] _Morals and Legislation_, ch. xii.

[407] _Morals and Legislation_, ch. xiv. (a chapter inserted from
Dumont's _Traites_).

[408] _Works_ ('Morals and Legislation'), i. p. 86.

[409] _Ibid._ i. 144.

[410] _Ibid._ i. 145.

[411] _Works_ ('Morals and Legislation'), i. 143.

[412] _Ibid._ i. 147-48.

[413] _Works_ ('Morals and Legislation'), i 406 _n._

[414] _Works_ ('Morals and Legislation'), i. 96 _n._

V. ENGLISH LAW

The practical value of Bentham's method is perhaps best illustrated by
his _Rationale of Evidence_. The composition of the papers ultimately
put together by J. S. Mill had occupied Bentham from 1802 to 1812. The
changed style is significant. Nobody could write more pointedly, or with
happier illustrations, than Bentham in his earlier years. He afterwards
came to think that a didactic treatise should sacrifice every other
virtue to fulness and precision. To make a sentence precise, every
qualifying clause must be somehow forced into the original formula.
Still more characteristic is his application of what he calls the
'substantive-preferring principle.'[415] He would rather say, 'I give
extension to an object,' than 'I extend an object.' Where a substantive
is employed, the idea is 'stationed upon a rock'; if only a verb, the
idea is 'like a leaf floating on a stream.' A verb, he said,[416] 'slips
through your fingers like an eel.' The principle corresponds to his
'metaphysics.' The universe of thought is made up of a number of
separate 'entities' corresponding to nouns-substantive, and when these
bundles are distinctly isolated by appropriate nouns, the process of
arranging and codifying according to the simple relations indicated by
the copula is greatly facilitated. The ideal language would resemble
algebra, in which symbols, each representing a given numerical value,
are connected by the smallest possible number of symbols of operation,
+, -, =, and so fo