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Where our inquiry is concerning co-existence, or repugnancy to co-exist, which by contemplation of our ideas we cannot discover; there experience, observation, and natural history, must give us, by our senses and by retail, an insight into corporeal substances.

Where, by the way, we may take notice, that universal propositions of whose truth or falsehood we can have certain knowledge concern not existence: and further, that all particular affirmations or negations that would not be certain if they were made general, are only concerning existence; they declaring only the accidental union or separation of ideas in things existing, which, in their abstract natures, have no known necessary union or repugnancy.

But now to apply his answer to the argument, How doth all this solve the repugnancy of his doctrine to the covenant?

The wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found slave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery.

As to the incompatibility or repugnancy to co-existence, we may know that any subject may have of each sort of primary qualities but one particular at once: v.g. each particular extension, figure, number of parts, motion, excludes all other of each kind.

Instead of a repugnancy between offer and assent which prevents an agreement, or between the terms of an agreement which makes it insensible on its fact, there may be a like repugnancy between a term of the contract and a previous representation of fact which is not expressly made a part of the contract. The representation may have been the chief inducement and very foundation of the bargain.

For the assertion carries in it a repugnancy to the standing rules of reason; forasmuch as the decayed stock of dry nourishment seems more naturally to call for its proper supplies.

So that in these cases there is no question except this; whether there be, or be not, a repugnancy or hostility between the law of Congress and the law of the State. Nor is it at all material, in this view, whether the law of the State be a law regulating commerce, or a law of police, nor by what other name or character it may be designated.

If this view were adopted, there would not be a contract subject to a condition, there would be no contract at all. But in truth there is a contract, and there is not even a condition. As has been said already, it is not every repugnancy that makes a contract void, and it is not every failure in the terms of the counter undertaking that makes it voidable.

If the law were so foolish as to aim at merely formal consistency, it might indeed be said that there was as absolute a repugnancy between the different terms of this contract as in the ease of an agreement to sell certain barrels of mackerel, where the barrels turned out to contain salt.