Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AMBIGUITY AND DEFINITION Illustrations of Ambiguity.?Our study of class names has shown that vagueness is their normal state rather than the exception. To render their meaning precise usually requires considerable effort, and even then we do not always succeed. Our present task is to trace in detail the way in which this vagueness becomes the source of ambiguity. The following argument is a case in point:
The better the law in any state of society the more good will be obtained from it, and from a prohibitory law half enforced more than from the most stringent license law enforced to perfection. Besides, Prohibition always holds up before the public mind the loftiest ideal of absolute right in the law. Thus the statute book, like the Bible, becomes an educator, although it may be violated. I am no believer in low, bad laws because there is vice and degradation among men. Lift up the ideals. It is injurious to society to ignore and violate the laws of Nature and of God. The golden rule is none too good law for the savage. God’s own laws being perfect are most violated, yet none of them have been repealed on that account. They are not enforced as well as the Maine liquor .law, but the Ten Commandments are as inflexible as the stone text of the original, and their author issues- no license even to those who pay fees into the Treasury of the Temple itself. It will only confirm existing drunken habits and enable the devil to retain his own, for us to adopt his legislation because we are not able fully to enforce any other.“ As to the merits of the question at issue we need not stop to inquire. So far as we are concerned, prohibition may be wise or unwise; our present business is solely with the reasoning by which the position adopted in the preceding quotat…
