[Sidenote: _Doctrines against the utility of laws. Their unmaintainability._] This indubitable truth, as to the impossibility of applying the law and of incorporating it in facts, and as to the necessity of acting in each case, according to historical exigencies, is the true reason for the turning of so many people's heads at different times and in different places, causing them to proclaim nothing less than the inutility of laws and to ask for their abolition. If it be necessary to come eventually to the individual action, and if deliberation and execution must be remitted to the action of the individual, what is the object of binding ourselves with bonds, which it is afterwards necessary to tear off and to break, that we may act? What is the object of laboriously constructing instruments, which we are obliged to throw away when we come to practical action, that we may use our naked hands? Owing to such ingenuous reasonings as these, people have come to long for a society without laws, in which each will do his own share of work, on account of its attractiveness alone, as we find among the Harmonicists of Fourier and in many other anarchical Utopias. Or they have sighed for the absolute paternal government of the good old days, for the geniality of a good-hearted tyrant, untrammelled with laws, who will be able to follow the best dictates of his heart. Or, to descend to less strange and more actual examples, it has been proposed that the judge should on each occasion create the law, according to the case before him; that is to say, that he should cease to be a judge (not having a law to apply, and properly speaking not being able to give judgment) and be a free decider of litigation and corrector of customs; or at least that he should free himself from _legal fictions_ and judge according to the individual reality of each individual case. [Sidenote: _Unsustainability of such confutations._] These theories are without doubt unsustainable, not excluding the last, which has the appearance of being moderate; because the so-called judicial fiction is intrinsic to the law and exists even when we think that it is not present, for it is always a fiction to place a concrete case in an abstract category. But defenders of the utility of law have met these erroneous doctrines with the bad argument that law does not admit of individual solutions, and demands strict obedience, because the moment of individuality, of inobservance, and of violation that may be called legitimate, does actually exist in the law and is intrinsic to its very nature. Both adversaries and defenders of law are therefore philosophically wrong, those who assert its inutility and those who claim for it an impossible utility. [Sidenote: _Empirical meanings of those controversies._]