LESSON ONE Test Law, Language, and Thinking like a Lawyer SCOPE AND PURPOSE “We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true”, said Holmes. Holmes left in at that, an isolated ornament dropped to float in no readily discernible context of an address at a bar association meeting. In this less frequently quoted of his legacy of magisterial pronouncements, he touched upon a broad range of age-old conundrums of philosophy, psychology, and education: the“reality”consisting of what he called facts and things, and the relationship between this reality and the process of “thinking”. Even more intriguing is the relationship of language to both facts and thinking. As usual, Holmes did not stop for side trips of interminable definition of philosophical subtleties, including such questions as the extent to which one can think at all except in language.