Walter Bagehot: “We must not bewilder ourselves with the inseparable accidents until we know the necessary essence.”

I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.

The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.