THE SCIENTIFIC LAW 107 



arranged according to their sizes. In some such way 

 as this, perhaps, we may look upon that great sorting- 

 machine — the human perceptive faculty. Sensations of 

 all kinds and magnitudes may flow into it, some to be 

 rejected at once, others to be sorted all orderly, and 

 arranged in place and time. It may be the perceptive 

 faculty itself, which, without our being directly conscious 

 of it, contributes the ordered sequence in time and 

 space to our sense-impressions. The routine of percep- 

 tion may be due to the recipient, and not characteristic 

 of the material. If anything like this be the case, then 

 (granted a co-ordination of perceptive and reasoning 

 faculties), it will be less surprising that, when the human 

 mind comes to analyse phenomena in time and space, it 

 should find itself capable of briefly describing the past, 

 and of predicting the future sequences of all manner of 

 sense -impressions. From this standpoint the nomic 

 natural law is an unconscious product of the machinery 

 of the perceptive faculty, while natural law in the scien- 

 tific sense is the conscious product of the reflective faculty, 

 analysing the process of perception, the working of the 

 sorting- machine. The whole of ordered nature is thus 

 seen as the product of one mind — the only mind with 

 which we are acquainted — and the fact that the routine 

 of perceptions can be expressed in brief formulae ceases 

 to be so mysterious as when we postulate a twofold 

 reason, one type characteristic of " things-in-themselves," 

 beyond our sense-impressions, and another type associated 

 with the machinery of nervous organisation. 



§ 1 4. — Science^ Natural Theology, and MetapJiysics 



The reader, I trust, will treat the matter of the last 

 two sections as pure suggestion and nothing more. What 

 we are sure of is a certain routine of perceptions and a 

 capacity in the mind to resume them in the mental short- 

 hand of scientific law. What we have no right to infer is 

 that order, mind, or reason — all human characters or 

 human conceptions falling on this side of sense-impressions 



