Science Quote by John Arbuthnot

Law as a bottomless pit is less a complaint than a warning label: step in, and you may never touch ground again. Arbuthnot, a sharp-tongued Augustan satirist who happened to have a physician's precision, turns a simple image into a diagnosis of an institution designed to absorb time, money, and certainty. The metaphor does two jobs at once. A pit implies danger and gravity: once you fall, the system itself does the pulling. Bottomless adds a particular cruelty, not just that the law is harsh, but that it is structurally incapable of closure.

The line lands in early 18th-century Britain, a world where expanding commerce, party politics, and a busy print culture helped swell litigation and professionalize legal gatekeeping. Arbuthnot wrote amid anxieties about corruption and rent-seeking; the courts could look less like neutral referees than like machines that convert ordinary conflict into procedural infinity. Calling it bottomless hints at the self-feeding logic: every dispute generates motions, precedents, appeals, fees. The pit isn't an accident; it's a business model.

There is also a sly class critique. People with resources can hover at the rim, paying for ladders and guides; everyone else gets swallowed. Coming from a doctor, the jab cuts sharper: law is not just a moral failing but a systemic pathology, an institution whose complexity produces dependence. The wit works because it feels physical. You can picture the drop, hear the echo, and recognize how easily "justice" becomes a long fall with no floor.