De Minimis non Curat Lex
i
Yes, but what is a minimum? Sometimes a maximum is a minimum, and sometimes the other way about. If you know you know, and if you don’t you don’t.
ii
Yes, but what is a minimum? So increased material weight involves increased moral weight, but where does there begin to be any weight at all? There is a miracle somewhere. At the point where two very large nothings have united to form a very little something.
iii
There is no such complete assimilation as assimilation of rhythm. In fact it is in assimilation of rhythm that what we see as assimilation consists.
When two liquid bodies come together with nearly the same rhythms, as, say, two tumblers of water, differing but very slightly, the two assimilate rapidly—becoming homogeneous throughout. So with wine and water which assimilate, or at any rate form a new homogeneous substance, very rapidly. Not so with oil and water. Still, I should like to know whether it would not be possible to have so much water and so little oil that the water would in time absorb the oil.
I have not thought about it, but it seems as though the maxim de minimis non curat lex—the fact that a wrong, a contradiction in terms, a violation of all our ordinary canons does not matter and should be brushed aside—it seems as though this maxim went very low down in the scale of nature, as though it were the one principle rendering combination (integration) and, I suppose, dissolution (disintegration) also, possible. For combination of any kind involves contradiction in terms; it involves a self-stultification on the part of one or more things, more or less complete in both of them. For one or both cease to be, and to cease to be is to contradict all one’s fundamental axioms or terms.
And this is always going on in the mental world as much as in the material; everything is always changing and stultifying itself more or less completely. There is no permanence of identity so absolute, either in the physical world, or in our conception of the word “identity,” that it is not crossed with the notion of perpetual change which, pro tanto, destroys identity. Perfect, absolute identity is like perfect, absolute anything—as near an approach to nothing, or nonsense, as our minds can grasp. It is, then, in the essence of our conception of identity that nothing should maintain a perfect identity; there is an element of disintegration in the only conception of integration that we can form.
What is it, then, that makes this conflict not only possible and bearable but even pleasant? What is it that so oils the machinery of our thoughts that things which would otherwise cause intolerable friction and heat produce no jar?
Surely it is the principle that a very overwhelming majority rides rough-shod with impunity over a very small minority; that a drop of brandy in a gallon of water is practically no brandy; that a dozen maniacs among a hundred thousand people produce no unsettling effect upon our minds; that a well-written i will go as an i even though the dot be omitted—it seems to me that it is this principle, which is embodied in de minimis non curat lex, that makes it possible that there should be majora and a lex to care about them. This is saying in another form that association does not stick to the letter of its bond.