PEARSON'S GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE. 303 



think he has proved its object to be of human origin. He goes to no 

 end of trouble to prove in various ways, what his opponent would have 

 granted with the utmost cheerfulness at the outset, that laws of nature 

 are rational; and, having got so far, he seems to think nothing more is 

 requisite than to seize a logical maxim as a leaping pole and lightly skip 

 to the conclusion that the laws of nature are of human provenance. 

 If he had thoroughly accepted the truth that all realities, as well as 

 all figments, are alike of purely mental composition, he would have 

 seen that the question was, not whether natural law is of an intellectual 

 nature or not, but whether it is of the number of those intellectual 

 objects that are destined ultimately to be exploded from the spectacle 

 of our universe, or whether, as far as we can judge, it has the stuff 

 to stand its ground in spite of all attacks. In other words, is there 

 anything that is really and truly a law of nature, or are all pretended 

 laws of nature figments, in which latter case, all natural science is a 

 delusion, and the writing of a grammar of science a very idle pastime? 



Professor Pearson's theory of natural law is characterized by a singu- 

 lar vagueness and by a defect so glaring as to remind one of the second 

 book of the Novum Organum or of some strong chess-player whose at- 

 tention has been so riveted upon a part of the board that a fatal danger 

 has, as it were, been held upon the blind-spot of his mental retina. The 

 manner in which the current of thought passes from the woods into the 

 open plain and back again into the woods, over and over again, betrays 

 the amount of labor that has been expended upon the chapter. The 

 author calls attention to the sifting action both of our perceptive and 

 of our reflective faculties. I think that I myself extracted from that vein 

 of thought pretty much all that is valuable in reference to the regu- 

 larity of nature in the Populae Science Monthly for June, 1878, 

 (p. 208). I there remarked that the degree to which nature seems to 

 present a general regularity depends upon the fact that the regularities 

 in it are of interest and importance to us, while the irregularities are 

 without practical use or significance; and in the same article I en- 

 deavored to show that it is impossible to conceive of nature's being 

 markedly less regular, taking it, *by and large,' than it actually is. But 

 I am confident, from having repeatedly returned to that line of 

 thought that it is impossible legitimately to deduce from any such con- 

 siderations the unreality of natural law. 'As a pure suggestion and noth- 

 ing more,' toward the end of the chapter, after his whole plea has been 

 put in, Dr. Pearson brings forward the idea that a transcendental opera- 

 tion of the perceptive faculty may reject a mass of sensation altogether 

 and arrange the rest in place and time, and that to this the laws in na- 

 ture may be attributable — a notion to which Kant undoubtedly leaned 

 at one time. The mere emission of such a theory, after his argument 

 has been fully set forth, almost amounts to a confession of failure to 



