Wherefore, although the over-mastering love of books has
possessed our mind from boyhood, and to rejoice in their delights
has been our only pleasure, yet the appetite for the books of the
civil law took less hold of our affections, and we have spent but
little labour and expense in acquiring volumes of this kind. For
they are useful only as the scorpion in treacle, as Aristotle,
the sun of science, has said of logic in his book De Pomo. We
have noticed a certain manifest difference of nature between law
and science, in that every science is delighted and desires to
open its inward parts and display the very heart of its
principles, and to show forth the roots from which it buds and
flourishes, and that the emanation of its springs may be seen of
all men; for thus from the cognate and harmonious light of the
truth of conclusion to principles, the whole body of science
will be full of light, having no part dark. But laws, on the
contrary, since they are only human enactments for the regulation
of social life, or the yokes of princes thrown over the necks of
their subjects, refuse to be brought to the standard of
synteresis, the origin of equity, because they feel that they
possess more of arbitrary will than rational judgment. Wherefore
the judgment of the wise for the most part is that the causes of
laws are not a fit subject of discussion. In truth, many laws
acquire force by mere custom, not by syllogistic necessity, like
the arts: as Aristotle, the Phoebus of the Schools, urges in the
second book of the Politics, where he confutes the policy of
Hippodamus, which holds out rewards to the inventors of new laws,
because to abrogate old laws and establish new ones is to weaken
the force of those which exist.
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