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The absorbing nature of public business from 1850 to 1867 withdrew him from the bar, and the records of the Supreme Court of Georgia have only about twenty-five cases argued by him in that time. Some of these were of commanding importance, and the opinions of the Justices handed down in that time bear impress of the conclusiveness of his reasoning and the power of his effort before that tribunal.
Notwithstanding the ingenuity and conclusiveness of those arguments, the chain of fatalities which has headed this story with the entry of Nov. 9th brings the reluctant secret to light: I was that homicidal maniac. The second page of the newspaper just quoted will be also found to contain, in another column, the following local item: We regret to learn that on the morning of Saturday last Mr.
I drew the indictment myself; and in my opening address to the jury dwelt with all the force and eloquence of which I was master upon the heinous nature of the crime, and the conclusiveness of the evidence by which it had been brought home to the prisoners. I may here, by way of parenthesis, mention that I resorted to a plan in my address to the jury which I have seldom known to fail.
"It was when we visited the murdered man's bedroom that the first doubts came to my mind as to the conclusiveness of the circumstantial evidence against Penreath. The theory was that Penreath, after murdering Mr. Glenthorpe, put the body on his shoulder, and carried it downstairs and up the rise to the pit.
But we are not satisfied to stop at this point. We intend, not merely to neutralize, but to explode, the theory of the sceptic. We intend to wrest from it the element of its strength, and grind it to atoms. We intend to lay our finger precisely upon the fallacy which lies so deeply concealed in its bosom, and from which it derives all its apparent force and conclusiveness.
It relates to manners, customs, and morals three things concerning which we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so the verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly as any one could do it, in the circumstances.
The considerations, which, as I apprehend, give, at the present day, to the proof of the law of uniformity of succession as true of all phenomena without exception, this character of completeness and conclusiveness, are the following: First, that we now know it directly to be true of far the greatest number of phenomena; that there are none of which we know it not to be true, the utmost that can be said being, that of some we can not positively from direct evidence affirm its truth; while phenomenon after phenomenon, as they become better known to us, are constantly passing from the latter class into the former; and in all cases in which that transition has not yet taken place, the absence of direct proof is accounted for by the rarity or the obscurity of the phenomena, our deficient means of observing them, or the logical difficulties arising from the complication of the circumstances in which they occur; insomuch that, notwithstanding as rigid a dependence on given conditions as exists in the case of any other phenomenon, it was not likely that we should be better acquainted with those conditions than we are.
So that the closest imitation which can be made, in the social science, of a legitimate induction from direct experience, gives but a specious semblance of conclusiveness, without any real value. The Method of Difference in either of its forms being thus completely out of the question, there remains the Method of Agreement.
The greatest difficulty in both cases is, first, that of obtaining the evidence, and next, of reducing it to the form which tests its conclusiveness. But if we try to reduce it without knowing what it is to be reduced to, we are not likely to make much progress.
A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.
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