difference between law and morals I do so with reference to a single
end, that of learning and understanding the law. For that purpose you
must definitely master its specific marks, and it is for that that I
ask you for the moment to imagine yourselves indifferent to other and
greater things.

I do not say that there is not a wider point of view from which
the distinction between law and morals becomes of secondary or no
importance, as all mathematical distinctions vanish in presence of the
infinite. But I do say that that distinction is of the first importance
for the object which we are here to consider--a right study and mastery
of the law as a business with well understood limits, a body of dogma
enclosed within definite lines. I have just shown the practical reason
for saying so. If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must
look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences
which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who
finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it,
in the vaguer sanctions of conscience. The theoretical importance of the
distinction is no less, if you would reason on your subject aright. The
law is full of phraseology drawn from morals, and by the mere force of
language continually invites us to pass from one domain to the other
without perceiving it, as we are sure to do unless we have the boundary
constantly before our minds. The law talks about rights, and duties, and
malice, and intent, and negligence, and so forth, and nothing is easier,
or, I may say, more common in legal reasoning, than to take these words
in their moral sense, at some state of the argument, and so to drop into
fallacy. For instance, when we speak of the rights of man in a moral
sense, we mean to mark the limits of interference with individual
freedom which we think are prescribed by conscience, or by our ideal,
however reached. Yet it is certain that many laws have been enforced