“ FICTIONS, or legal fictions, in law, the term used for false averments, the truth of which is not permitted to be called in question. English law as well as Roman law abounds in fictions. Sometimes they are merely the condensed expression of a rule of law,—e.g., the fiction of English law that husband and wife were one person, and the fiction of Roman law that the wife was the daughter of the husband. Sometimes they must be regarded as reasons invented in order to justify a rule of law according to an implied ethical standard. ”

“ The legal attributes of the king, and even of the House of Lords, are fictions. If we could suppose that the effects of the Reform Acts had been brought about, not by legislation, but by the decisions of law courts and the practice of House of Commons committees—by such assumptions as that freeholder includes lease-holder and that ten means twenty—we should have in the legal constitution of the House of Commons the same kind of fictions that we find in the legal statement of the attributes of the crown and the House of Lords. ”

“ The legal mind instinctively seizes upon concrete aids to abstract reasoning. Many hard and revolting fictions must have begun their career as metaphors. In some cases the history of the change may still almost be traced. The conception that a man-of-war is a floating island, or that an ambassador’s house is beyond the territorial limits of the country in which he resides, was originally a figure of speech designed to set a rule of law in a striking light. ”