Thoughts & Quotes of Blupete:

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LANGUAGE:

¶ What makes man unique is his collective experience that there is a pool from which each may contribute and take, through language.

¶ "Words, in fact, are symbols instead of signs. They are artificial constructions, tools for dealing more efficiently with the business of existence; so that language is properly speaking a branch of technology. Words are tools for thinking. Chimpanzees can construct some sort of concepts; but conceptual thoughts only became efficient and productive with the aid of proper tools, in the shape of verbal symbols. Like all tools, words need skill for their use. Human language is thus not merely a collection of words, but an elaborate technique. ...
Verbal language was perhaps the greatest technical invention of living substance. It enables human beings to communicate and share with each other, and in so doing it automatically gives rise to the second major uniqueness of man -- a common pool of experience for a group." (Julian Huxley.)

¶ "Every word is a prejudice." (Nietzsche.)

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Language."
LAISSEY FAIRE:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- June 11th, 2000.
LAW:

¶ A cobweb, often entangling the weak, and just as often the sport of the strong.

¶ "As formerly we suffered from crimes, so now we suffer from laws." (Tacitus.)

¶ "The laws of the country are therefore ineffectual and abortive, because they are made by the rich for the poor, by the wise for the ignorant, by the respectable and exalted in station for the very scum and refuse of the community." (William Hazlitt, "Jeremy Bentham.")

¶ "What are laws but expressions of the opinion of some class which has power over the rest of the community? By what was the world ever governed but by the opinion of some person or persons? By what else can it ever be governed? What are all systems, religious, political, or scientific, but opinions resting on evidence more or less satisfactory? The question is not between human opinion and some higher and more certain mode of arriving at truth, but between opinion and opinion, between the opinions of one man and another, or of one class and another, or of one generation and another." (Macaulay, "Southey's Colloquies.")

¶ To look down on the processes of the law (structure of society) is to look down on a chess board; there are Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns -- the law (life) is a game.

¶ It might be better to law and justice that any issue be decided at once by a cast of the dice (as they were in Rabelais's work) rather than be kept in frivolous and tormenting suspense.

¶ A law court is to be put in a position so that it might be sure of the facts on which it must make its decision, one that may critically effect the lives of the litigants. The sureness of the court in respect to any of its findings to any question raised is to come about as a result of an objective, secure, safe, certain, trustworthy, and reliable fact gathering process. Such a process governed by evidentiary law has come about as a result of centuries of judicial decisions. (See, Common Law.)

¶ "The plea of humanity is lost by going through the process of law; ..." (William Hazlitt, "Mr. Brougham -- Sir F. Burdett.")

¶ "The wavering and pitiful cant of policy; ..." (William Hazlitt, "Mr. Brougham -- Sir F. Burdett.")

¶ "In many ways, the law, which was primarily a law of land, served the purpose and set the tone of the upper classes." This situation, as Harding was to further observe, is not unlike the Marxist view of law as the dominant class. [Harding, A Social History of English Law.]
The beginning of Civil Law, c. 1200:

¶ "The writ of right for the recovery of land, the possessory assizes for the protection of possessions, debt for the recovery of money owed, detinue for the detention of a chattel, covenant for breach of contract, later to be confined to contracts under seal: these formed the staple diet of the practitioner of the early thirteenth century. Any case falling outside the orbit of these forms of action must go to Parliament, in its capacity -- which Professor Mcllwain labels as its primary capacity in the Middle Ages -- of a supreme court of law. But during the first part of Henry III's reign a new planet swam into the ken of the common law, for the action of trespass broke free from the criminal law and started on its meteoric career, whose climax was reached only when it had, through its greater flexibility and other merits, established complete ascendancy over all other writs. Prior to Henry III's reign, crimes were divided into felonies and trespasses, but then the field of tort began to separate itself from that of crime; the more serious trespasses remained criminal, under the name of misdemeanours, and the less serious segregated themselves altogether from the criminal, and attached themselves to the civil sphere." [Hanbury, English Courts of Law.]
LAWS, THE MAKING OF:

¶ "... function of making laws, for which a numerous popular assembly is radically unfit." Thus JSM thought that there should be a Legislative Commission: "consisting of a small number of highly trained political minds, on whom, when Parliament has determined that a law shall be made, the task of making it should be devolved: Parliament retaining the power of passing or rejecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering it otherwise than by sending proposed amendments to be dealt with by the Commission." (John Stuart Mill, Autobiography.)
LAW, ECCLESIASTICAL:

¶ "The church had its own law courts. Cases involving not merely priests but monks, students, crusaders, widows, orphans and the helpless were reserved for the clerical courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages and oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the layman found himself in conflict with the priest he had to go to a clerical court." (H. G. Wells.)
LAWS, POPPER'S SOCIOLOGICAL LAWS:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- November 26th, 2000.
LAW, SUMPTUARY:

¶ Though the expression has taken on a lot of colour, such that for some its meaning has been reduced down to laws which concern themselves with diet or dress, in its fullest meaning it is that law the object of which is to control expenditure particularly on unnecessary things. (The trick is to sort out the necessary [that which brings universal benefit] from the unnecessary [that which brings benefit only to a special group].) Sumptuary law is that law which each one of us (at least those who are at all financially responsible) have come to know, quite naturally, as we try to limit expenditures, match them, so to speak, to a limited income. In respect to the government's income and government's expenditure: sumptuary law is the kind of law of which this country is in desperate need.

Law, Halifax ...:

¶ See Presumption Of Innocence.

Law, Lydford ...:

¶ See Presumption Of Innocence.
LAWYERS:

¶ "Every fair-minded person will cast from his mind any impression derived from the vituperation of the defendant. Every litigant detests the solicitors on the other side; not even the most magnanimous can bring himself to believe that they are not at the bottom of the litigation, either advising and putting up the plaintiff to advance an unjust claim or inducing the defendant to resist a claim wholly just!" [Mr. Justice Riddell, "A New View of Bardell v. Pickwick," The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 2 (1922), p. 200.]

¶ "It is the pride of the profession of law that no person, however poor, is ever prevented from pressing an honest claim from want of means. Scores of action have been and scores more will be brought for impecunious clients by solicitors who can have no possible hope of payment, or even for out of pocket disbursements, unless they are successful and to get their costs out of the defendant." (Riddell, "A New View of Bardell v. Pickwick," op. cit., p. 203.)

¶ As Hazlitt was to observe of Mr. Tooke, he had "the mind of a lawyer, a rigid and constant habit of attending to the exact import of every word and clause in a sentence. ... Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words, as the chemists do substances; he separated those which are compounded of others from those which are not decompoundable. He did not explain the obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex by the simple." ("Mr. Horne Tooke.")

¶ "It would not be astonishing if the attorneys "encouraged" the plaintiff. Everyone who has practised law can tell of clients losing heart and hope and requiring encouragement; if that were a crime, few would escape. It is always the person who is trying to keep the plaintiff out of his legal rights who is indignant at the lawyer "encouraging" the plaintiff." (Mr. Justice Riddell, "A New View of Bardell v. Pickwick," The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 2 (1922), p. 203.)

¶ From Haliburton's The Season Ticket, we see where Shegog was commiserating with his friend, Cary, when Cary described what he thought was three great social evils afflicting England -- lawyers, doctors, and partners." But it was on lawyers that Cary wreaked his peevishness: "I hate a lawyer, Sir; I have a natural antipathy to one as my mother had to a cat. If I perceive one in the room I feel faint, gasp for breath, and rush to the door. They are so like cats in their propensities, that I suppose I may call this dislike hereditary ... They purr around you, and rub against you coaxingly when they want you to overcome your prejudice against their feline tribe. They play before they pounce." Cary continues in describing lawyers, "with all their faults, are jolly fellows compared to the doctors. The former fight it out in court, in presence of the judge, jury, and audience, and the public decide for themselves on their respective merits. When the trial is over, they walk off, arm in arm, in great good-humour, dine together, laugh at the jokes of the judge, the stupidity of the jury, and the way the witnesses were bullied and bamboozled."

¶ "If people have sometimes pushed me into the management of other men's affairs, I have promised to take them in hand, not in lungs and liver; to take them on my shoulders, not incorporate them into me; to be concerned over them, yes; to be impassioned over them, never. I look to them, but I do not brood over them. I have enough to do to order and arrange the domestic pressures that oppress my entrails and veins, without giving myself the trouble of adding extraneous pressures to them; I am enough involved in my essential, proper, and natural affairs, without inviting in foreign ones." (Montaigne.)

¶ In writing of William Pitt, Chatterton was to observe: "He had the barrister's faculty in clarifying a case, casting aside the non-essentials and enabling the main facts to stand out by themselves so conspicuously that even the average mind could perceive them." [A Life of William Pitt, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930).]

¶ Not all lawyers make a living at practising law. There are quite a few such as the one described by Cobbett in 1818: "A man, who, bred to the bar, had never had a two-guinea fee in his life."

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Lawyers."
LAWYERS & HISTORY & LITERATURE:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- December 31st, 2000.
LEADERS:

¶ In writing of William Pitt, Chatterton observed: "He [Pitt] possessed ... that wonderful and invaluable power of disciplined concentration which enables a man to lay aside any immediate trouble (however weighty) and keep his mind fixed undisturbed on the main subject. ... The tragic death of an old friend within his presence could not ruffle his composure. It is that same self-composure which during a great war enables admirals and generals to carry on with the main strategy and refuse to be led away by minor tactical defeats." [A Life of William Pitt, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930).]

¶ "To use means to ends; to set causes in motion; to wield the machine of society; to subject the wills of others to your own; to manage abler men than yourself by means of that which is stronger in them than their wisdom, viz. their weakness and their folly; to calculate the resistance of ignorance and prejudice to your designs, and by obviating, to turn them to account; to foresee a long, obscure, and complicated train of events, of chances and openings of success; to unwind the web of others' policy and weave your own out of it; to judge of the effects of things, not in the abstract, but with reference to all their bearings, ramifications, and impediments; to understand character thoroughly; to see latent talent or lurking treachery; to know mankind for what they are, and use them as they deserve; to have a purpose steadily in view, and to effect it after removing every obstacle; to master others and be true to yourself, asks power and knowledge, both nerves and brain. ... Such is the sort of talent that may be shown and that has been possessed by the great leaders on the stage of the world." (William Hazlitt, "On Thought and Action.")

¶ John Keegan was to write of George C. Marshall: "Marshall who rarely lost his temper and never raised his voice, was terrifying. Tall, spare, his heavily handsome face expressionless save for a permanent suggestion of disappointment at the world's failure to match his Olympian qualities of mind and comportment, he had deliberately cut himself off from old friendships as he rose to the top of the army and, now that he had reached its pinnacle, appeared to subsist without any companionship whatever." (Six Armies in Normandy.)

§ See blupete's commentary of -- May 17th, 1998.
LEGISLATION:

¶ "The manner of our legislation is indeed detestable, and the machinery for settling that manner odious. A committee of the whole House, dealing, or attempting to deal, with the elaborate clauses of a long Bill, is a wretched specimen of severe but misplaced labour. It is sure to wedge some clause into the Act, such as that which the judge said 'seemed to have fallen by itself, perhaps, from heaven, into the mind of the legislature', so little had it to do with anything on either side or around it. At such times government by a public meeting displays its inherent defects, and is little restrained by its necessary checks." (Bagehot.)

¶ "... in matching means to ends and asking whether rights or freedoms are impaired as little as possible, a legislature mediating between the claims of competing groups will be forced to strike a balance without the benefit of absolute certainty concerning how the balance is best struck. Vulnerable groups will claim the need for protection by the government whereas other groups and individuals will assert that the government should not intrude. . . . When striking a balance between the claims of competing groups, the choice of means, like the choice of ends, frequently will require an assessment of conflicting scientific evidence and differing justified demands on scarce resources. Democratic institutions are meant to let us all share in the responsibility for these difficult choices. Thus, as courts review the results of the legislature's deliberations, particularly with respect to the protection of vulnerable groups, they must be mindful of the legislature's representative function." (Supreme Court of Canada, Irwin Toy.)

¶ Cardozo, in his work, The Nature of the Judicial Process written in 1921, quoted a fellow jurist, "The fact is that the difficulties of so-called interpretation arise when the legislature has had no meaning at all; when the question which is raised on the statute never occurred to it; when what the judges have to do is, not to determine what the legislature did mean on a point which was present to its mind, but to guess what it would have intended on a point not present to its mind, if the point had been present." (Yale University Press, 1961.)

¶ "The most detailed statutes can only talk in abstract terms about classes of situation." [Harding, A Social History of English Law (Pelican, 1966).]

¶ "... the most common and unavoidable in adequacy of a statute is its failure to foresee all the contingencies for which it seeks to provide." (Harding, A Social History of English Law op. cit.)

¶ Haydon's Case, 1584, laid down the essential rules for statutory interpretation: First, What was the Common Law before the making of the Act; Second, What was the mischief and defect for which the Common Law did not provide; Third, What was Parliament's remedy; and Fourth, what was the "true reason" of the remedy, which would assist the judges to fulfil Parliament's intent?

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Legislation."
LEISURE:

¶ "What can power give more than food and drink,
To live at ease, and not be bound to think?" (Dryden: Medal.)

¶ "Leisure without study is death." (Seneca.)
LIBERTY:

¶ "Virtue, the spouse of Liberty!
Brutus's exclamation, 'Oh Virtue, I thought thee a substance, but I find thee a shadow
In liberty's defence, my noble task, ...
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask, ...'" (Milton.)

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Liberty."
LIBRARY:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- April 11th, 1999.
LIFE:

¶ "... we are all exiles on an inhospitable shore." (Bertrand Russell.)

¶ "New individuals develop from portions of the living substance of other individuals. The original individual may simply split in two; or it may detach a portion of its substance to serve as a basis for the new individual's development. Even in very large organisms, the detached portions may be only microscopic single cells, as in the spores of plants. In sexual reproduction, two such detached cells, the sperm and the ovum, fuse to form one. But in every case, there is a continuity of living substance, a reproductive stream of life flowing down the generations." (Julian Huxley.)

¶ Take Life as a Spectator -- The Very Involvement in Life is a Distraction from the Business of Understanding It: "For people like you and me, whose main business is necessarily with books, I rather think experience of life should be as far as possible vicarious. If one has instinctive sympathy, one comes to know the true history of a certain number of people and from that one can more or less create one's world. But to plunge into life oneself takes a great deal of time and energy, and is, for most people, incompatible with preserving the attitude of a spectator. One needs, as the key to interpret alien experience, a personal knowledge of great unhappiness; but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek, for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragic phantasmagoria of people hoping, suffering, and then dying, begins to suffice without one's desiring to take part, except occasionally to speak a word of encouragement where it is possible." (Bertrand Russell.)

¶ "Everyone who realizes at all what human life is must feel at some time the strange loneliness of every separate soul; loneliness makes a new strange tie ..." (Bertrand Russell.)
LIFE STYLE:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- January 24th, 1999.
LOBBY GROUPS (Special Interests):

¶ In each group, all of which make up the whole of society, there are but "two interests -- its separate interest and its share of the general interest. That which ought to be represented is the latter. What really is represented is the former." (John Stuart Mill.)
LOVE:

¶ Trelawny recollects of Byron: "As to the oft-vexed question of the Poet's separation from his wife ... he treated women as things devoid of soul or sense; he would not eat, pray, walk, nor talk, with them. ... who would have marvelled that a lady tenderly reared and richly endowed, pious, learned, and prudent, deluded into marrying such a man, should have thought him mad or worse, and sought safety by flight? Within certain degrees of affinity marriages are forbidden; so they should be where there is no natural affinity of feelings, habits tastes, or sympathies." [Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, (1858) (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 2nd ed., 1859), at p. 70.]

§ See blupete's essay -- "On Love."
LUCK:

¶ The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (The Book of Ecclesiastes.) Chance is a word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a cause. (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764.)
LYING:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- April 5th, 1998.

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