Some writers indeed altogether deny that any standard, in the common sense of the word, either is, or ought to be, aimed at in legal proceedings. For instance, Sir J. F. Stephen, in his work on English Criminal Law,[25] after noticing and rejecting such standards as that last indicated, comes to the conclusion that the only standard recognized by our law is that which induces juries to convict:--"What is judicial proof? That which being permitted by law to be given in evidence, induces twelve men, chosen according to the Jury Act, to say that, having heard it, their minds are satisfied of the truth of the proposition which it affirms. They may be prejudiced, they may be timid, they may be rash, they may be ignorant; but the oath, the number, and the property qualification, are intended, as far as possible, to neutralize these disadvantages, and answer precisely to the conditions imposed upon standards of value or length." (p. 263.) To admit this is much about the same thing as to abandon such a standard as unattainable. Evidence which induces a jury to convict may doubtless be a standard to me and others of what we ought to consider 'reasonably certain,' provided of course that the various juries are tolerably uniform in their conclusions. But it clearly cannot be proposed as a standard to the juries themselves; if their decisions are to be consistent and uniform, they want some external indication to guide them. When a man is asking, _How_ certain ought I to feel? to give such an answer as the above is, surely, merely telling him that he is to be as certain as he is. If, indeed, juries composed a close profession, they might, as was said above, retain a traditional standard. But being, as they are, a selection from the ordinary lay public, their own decisions in the past can hardly be held up to them as a direction what they are to do in future. 31. It would appear therefore that we may fairly say that the English law, at any rate, definitely rejects the main assumption upon which the logical doctrine of modality and its legal counterpart are based: the assumption, namely, that different grades of conviction can be marked off from one another with sufficient accuracy for us to be able to refer individual cases to their corresponding classes. And that with regard to the collateral question of fixing a standard of certainty, it will go no further than pronouncing, or implying, that we are to be content with nothing short of, but need not go beyond, 'reasonable certainty.'