ends of the mouth turn down as the years pass! This is the story of an adventure, told obliquely; it is not a work of scholarship. Rational choice was the yardstick; not academic excellence. The presentation and the writing too leave a good deal to be desired; for the simple reason that the book has been written at odd moments, often when I've been tired. Metaphorically speaking, it was written between the Wakefield Quarter Sessions and the Huddersfield County Court. It was rewritten between the Leeds and Middlesbrough Crown Courts. This was inevitable; it was a book that could only have been written by a professional lawyer. It couldn't have been written by anyone else. So the reader must try to excuse the presentation, for the sake of any validity in the argument.
One assumption has been made from the start, namely that the world of tangible material things and the spiritual world of intangible things are one. It is convenient to refer to them as two worlds; but they are in fact one. They interpenetrate, they are mutually dependent, and they are inseparable except when death supervenes. Furthermore the invisible world is subject to laws, just like the material world. The laws are laws of action, laws of dynamics rather than statics; also they are not always laws of cause and effect. I think it is a misuse of language to describe laws of trust and confidence as laws of cause and effect. Only part of the invisible world is susceptible to analysis, the better part is not; but it is still true that it is an ordered place subject to laws. There is another side to it, which I will discuss shortly; but I am tempted to assert that what I have said so far is so elementary that it is beyond argument.
At least no lawyer ought to dispute it. Legal cases, whether civil or criminal, consist in threading one's way through the labyrinth of this ordered invisible world; marshalling such strength as one's witnesses can muster, against the exposed weaknesses of the other side. Cardoso J. in his essays, “The Nature…