Orders of Reality and of Law 417 



which enter into the economist's aggregate — human beings 

 in this case. Indeed, we should have here an example of " ex- 

 plaining " in a strictly mechanistic way, if the economist 

 could actually account for economic phenomena and pre- 

 dict entirely in terms of his understanding of human be- 

 havior — that is, the behavior of human individuals in 

 various situations. 



The notion of emergence helps us to understand the 

 appearance of novelties in the universe, without offending 

 our bias toward uniformity. It enables us to accept the ap- 

 pearance of the new by discontinuous jumps without imply- 

 ing the miraculous. It makes unnecessary the intervention 

 of a creative act in the cruder sense — that of making some- 

 thing out of nothing, or that of irresponsible infraction of 

 the order of the universe. The emergent, however unex- 

 pected or unpredictable, is conceived as a shift of action 

 onto a different level, or into a new direction, the establish- 

 ment of new kinds of relationships. In this sense, then, we 

 may interpret many of our problems that seem to call for 

 special essences or principles that are not *' mechanistic." 



There are numerous apparent breaks among the va- 

 rious orders of reality — from elements to compounds, from 

 non-living to living, from physiological processes to men- 

 tality, from organic to social, and so on. These abrupt breaks 

 are not to be considered as miracles. Nor is it necessary to 

 call upon special acts of creation to account for them, even 

 though we may not be able, for the present, to explain them 

 in simpler terms. We have already learned to accept the 

 principle of uniformity in each of several separate fields. 

 But the laws of one order seem to be transcended by the 

 processes in another order. The physicist cannot account 

 for the properties of compounds from his knowledge of 

 elementary substances; nor can he account for organic proc- 

 esses from a knowledge of physico-chemical principles. Be- 

 cause the facts themselves are familiar enough, however, he 

 does not feel called upon to assume a Chemism or a Salinity 

 as an active principle to explain what happens. Nor does 



