[25]
But the laws governing
these cases sometimes admit of other bases. For
example, conjecture is involved in quite a number of
such cases, as when the accused urges either that he
did not commit the act or, if he did, acted with the
best intentions. I could quote many examples of
this kind. Again, it is definition which tells us what
precisely is meant by lunacy or cruelty to a wife.1
For as a rule the laws cited in such themes involve
certain legal questions, though not to such an extent
as to determine the basis of the case.
1 The general sense of 25 and 26 is clear. These cases do not always come under the status qualitatis: they not infrequently come under the status coniecturalis and finitivus. They cannot however, strictly be said to come under the states legalis, since although the leges of such scholastic themes do involve certain questions of law, these are not such as to constitute the status legally. Still in the last resort such cases may be argued on legal grounds. The text adopted for the last sentence of 25 is that which involves the least change, but it is highly obscure and the corruption may well lie deeper still. For the whole question of bases, which is highly technical, see III, vi.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.