7. That law can never be against reason our lawyers are agreed; and that not the letter that is every construction of it, but that which is according to the intention of the legislator, is the law. And it is true, but the doubt is of whose reason it is that shall be received for law. It is not meant of any private reason, for then there would be as much contradiction in the laws as there is in the schools; nor yet, as Sir Edward Coke makes it, an “artificial perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experience,” as his was. For it is possible long study may increase and confirm erroneous sentences, and where men build on false grounds, the more they build the greater is the ruin: and of those that study and observe with equal time and diligence, the reasons and resolutions are, and must remain, discordant, and therefore it is not that juris prudentia