“And would they hang a boy of seventeen in Canada?” asked the layman.
“Why not?” enquired the jurist, “They can hang anyone here who has reached the age of discretion, and who knows the difference between right and wrong.”
“And will you tell me,” parried the layman, “just what that age is, and exactly what that difference is?”
The jurist eyed his inquisitor for a moment, and burst into a laugh. “Only a fool would ask such a question!” he retorted, and turned away.
All of which goes to show that a man may be proficient in legal technique, and yet be an ignoramus in ethics. Knowledge of the meaning of the word “right” is both possible and profitable, and it is hardly too much to suppose that such knowledge, when disseminated, might even produce a salutary effect upon legal theory and legal practice.
Anyone who endeavors to marshal the array of all the uses to which the word “right” is put, will be astonished to find out how extensive the list is. In point of the richness of its denotation and connotation, this concept exceeds the term “good.” And while it resembles that word in being used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb, it significantly differs from the term “good” in that it is employed to refer principally to the relations and functions of things, and hardly ever to objects of the physical environment.
No man’s span of perception is large enough, or his span of attention long enough, to surround the complete array of the uses of the word “right” unless this array be divided into classes. Such division will presently appear. And I think it can be shown that no matter how little in common some of the terms of this array seem, to a casual observer, to possess, when they are thus grouped into classes, they will be subtly linked together by adequate bonds. Let us then introduce:
Class A
The Word “Right” as a Term that is Descriptive of Certain Mathematical Relationships and Physical Functions.[11]
The original signification of our concept was straight, a word, be it noted, that is usually defined in the negative. (See Ex. 1, p. 76.) Why we have a negative definition for a word that seems to have a positive meaning, especially to mathematicians and draughtsmen, is not at first quite obvious. However, when this phenomenon is duly examined from the point of view of the mechanics of man’s locomotor apparatus, its secret is no longer hidden. All of the movements naturally produced by the appendages of the body are curvilinear: the arm being a lever, or radius vector, it always draws arcs in space or on paper; so does the hand as a whole, and so do the fingers. “Right” signifying straight, therefore, is defined negatively simply because straight lines are alien to the physics and mechanics of man’s original nature.