THE SCIENTIFIC LAW 91 



duty of science does not end with siiowing an argument 

 to be fallacious ; it has to investigate the origin of the 

 fallacy and show the nature of the process by which it 

 has arisen. In the present case I do not think we have 

 far to seek. Briefly stated, the " argument from design " 

 consists in the production of evidence from the laws of 

 nature, tending to exhibit those laws as the product of a 

 rational being or of reason in one or another form. Now, 

 although in the law of nature defined as a mere concatena- 

 tion of phenomena, as a sequence of sense-impressions, 

 there is, so far as I can perceive, no evidence of reason in 

 any intelligible sense of the word, yet in the law of science, 

 and in that branch of it which in this work we have 

 termed natural law, there is every evidence of reason. So 

 soon as man begins to form conceptions from his sense- 

 impressions, to combine, to isolate, and to generalise, then 

 he begins to project his oivn reason into phenomena, to 

 replace in his mind the stored sense-impressions of past 

 concatenations of phenomena by those brief resumes or 

 formulae which describe the sequences of sense-impressions 

 in mental shorthand. He begins to confuse the scientific 

 law, the product of his own reason, with the mere con- 

 catenation of phenomena, the natural law in the sense of 

 Hooker and the Stoics. As he projects his sense-impres- 

 sions outside himself, and forgets that they are essentially 

 conditioned by his own perceptive faculty, so he uncon- 

 sciously severs himself from the products of his own reason, 

 projects them into phenomena, only to refind them again 

 and wonder what reason put them there. Here, in the 

 double sense of the word natural law, lies the origin of 

 much obscure speculation. 



The reason we find in natural phenomena is surely put 

 there by the only reason of which we have any experience, 

 namely, the human reason. The mind of man in the pro- 

 cess of classifying phenomena and formulating natural law 

 introduces the element of reason into nature, and the 

 logic man finds in the universe is but the reflection of his 

 own reasoning faculty. A dog, if able to recognise the 

 instinct which guides his actions, might very naturally 



