THE SCIENTIFIC LAW 95 



origin of law in all its senses, and thus no claim to priority 

 on the part of either jurist or scientist can be historically 

 proven. No individual writer can hope with success to 

 remould such old-established usage as is associated with 

 the word law, and all he can strive to do is to keep clearly 

 distinct in the mind of his readers the sense in which the 

 word on each occasion is used.^ 



S 9. — Physical and Metaphysical Siipersensuoiisness 



Having now analysed our ideas of law, and reached a 

 definition of law in its scientific sense, it may be well, 

 even at the cost of repetition, to discuss at greater length 

 our conclusions and their application to a reasoned theory 

 of life. From the material provided by the senses, either 

 directly or in the form of stored sense-impresses, we draw 

 conceptions. About these conceptions we reason, en- 

 deavouring to ascertain their relationships and to express 

 their sequences in those brief statements or formulae which 

 we have termed scientific laws. In this process we often 

 analyse the material of sense-impressions into elements 

 which are not in themselves capable of forming distinct 

 sense-impressions ; we reach conceptions which are not 

 capable of direct verification by the senses ; that is to 

 say, we can never, or at least we cannot at present, assert 

 that these elements have objective reality (see our p. 51). 

 Thus physicists reduce the groups of sense-impressions 

 which we term material substances to the elements mole- 

 cule and atoni^ and discuss the motion of these elements, 

 which have never been, and perhaps never can become, 

 direct sense-impressions. No physicist ever saw or felt 

 an individual atom. Atom and molecule are intellectual 

 conceptions by aid of which physicists classify phenomena, 

 and formulate the relationships between their sequences. 

 From a certain standpoint, therefore, these conceptions of 



1 For the remainder of this work I shall, for convenience, however, speak 

 of natural law in the old sense, or, as a mere routine of perceptions, as law 

 in the nomic sense. Law in the nomic sense is thus no product of the reason, 

 but a pure order of perceptions, while Bramhall's coinage anomy may be con- 

 veniently used for a breach in the routine of perceptions. 



