975
THE KING’S BUSINESS
the many persons who may have done a deed, but only the one way in which it was done and the person who did if. It is the many possibilities that never became actualities that constitute the whole field for detective work, and occasion most of the labors of judge and jury. If there were only one way for an event to take place; i.e., if every theory which meets the con ditions of the case in hand were the cor rect .theory, there would be nothing for detectives to do and the function of courts would be declarative, whereas in reality the chief function of the courts is to determine that one possibility which became the actu ality in the case. But the most painstaking procedure does not wholly prevent false convictions. The prosecutor presents a the ory of the commission of a crime, which meets all the conditions of the case, as made out by the evidence in his possession, convinces twelve jurymen, and secures a conviction. Yet sometimes afterward it is found out that another person committed the crime in an entirely different way. A recent case, which interested two continents, is that of Andrew Toth, who has been released from the Western Penitentiary, of Pennsylvania, after serving twenty years on a life sentence for murder; his release being brought about by the death-bed con fession of a man in Austria. 2. That the mathematical dictum under consideration is inapplicable to literature is equally well established. Sir Peter le Page Renouf argued with great acuteness and force that it is possible to assign sig nifications to an unknown script, give meanings to the words thus formed,* con struct a grammer, and translate inscrip tions as historical statements and make good sense, though not a single sign or word or construction or thought be cor rect. He says, indeed: “It is not difficult to make out the Ten Commandments, the Psalms of David, the Homeric poems, or the Irish melodies, on any ancient or mod ern monument whatever, and in any lan guage you please.” Not that it is not pos sible to avoid this, but that it is possible to
nishes one solution of the problem in hand, of which there may be other, sometimes several, correct solutions. But mathemat ical dicta are not always true in life' and literature and especially not in history, which in its unwritten form is but the com plex of life and in its written form the union of life and literature. Life, litera ture, and history do not lie. within the domain of universal truth, the domain of all possibilities, but in the realm of actual ities, and all possibilities have not become actualities. Indeed, most things have never been done. For in life, literature, and history there enters a new and most potent element, human volition, which chooses among all the possibilities one only in each case to become the actuality in the event. So that here there are not several possible solu tions of the problem of the event, but one only, and that the right one. All other pro posed solutions are false, however well they provide for the event, and even if they pro vide for it better than the real solution of the problem, for people do not always do things in the best or even the easiest way. The problem, indeed, in life, literature, and history is not to determine possibilities, but an actuality, not one or several of the ways in which an event might have taken place, nor even the way in which it might best have taken place, but the way in which it did take place. A theory which meets all the conditions of the case in hand may be one of the sev eral ways in which the event might have taken place, and yet it may be that it did not take place in that way at all; and only by independent, genuine corroborative evi dence is any theory to be attested as the way in which the event actually did take place. 1. That this statement of the case is cor rect in the experiences of life, we have abundant evidence in the proceedings of courts of law. Here judge and jury are not interested in discovering the many ways in which an event may have taken place or
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