LOGIC OF PRACTICE OR ART. 545 



govern their conduct. The first, for example, is the case of a 

 judge, under a definite written code. The judge is not called 

 upon to determine what course would be intrinsically the 

 most advisable in the particular case in hand, but only within 

 what rule of law it falls ; what the legislator has ordained to 

 be done in the kind of case, and must therefore be presumed 

 to have intended in the individual case. The method must 

 here be wholly and exclusively one of ratiocination, or syllo 

 gism ; and the process is obviously, what in our analysis of 

 the syllogism we showed that all ratiocination is, namely the 

 interpretation of a formula. 



In order that our illustration of the., opposite case may be 

 taken from the same class of subjects as the former, we will 

 suppose, in contrast with the situation, of the judge, the posi 

 tion of a legislator. As the judge has laws for his guidance, 

 so the legislator has rules, and maxims of policy ; but it 

 would be a manifest error to suppose that the legislator is 

 bound by these maxims in the same manner as the judge is 

 bound by the laws, and that all he has to do is to argue down 

 from them to the particular case, as the judge does from the 

 laws. The legislator is bound to take into consideration the 

 reasons or grounds of the maxim; the judge has nothing to 

 do with those of the law, except so far as a consideration of 

 them may throw light upon the intention of the law-maker, 

 where his words have left it doubtful. To the judge, the rule, 

 once positively ascertained, is final ; but the legislator, or other 

 practitioner, who goes by rules rather than by their reasons, 

 like the old-fashioned German tacticians who were vanquished 

 by Napoleon, or the physician who preferred that his patients 

 should die by rule rather than recover contrary to it, is rightly 

 judged to be a mere pedant, and the slave of his formulas. 



Now, the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other 

 rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corre 

 sponding science. 



The relation in which rules of art stand to doctrines of 

 science may be thus characterized. The art proposes to itself 

 an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to 

 the science. The science receives it, considers it as a pheno- 



VOL. ii. 35 



