THE SCIENTIFIC LAW 109 



mark that their beHef is without meaning for us. But if 

 they assert that the phenomenal world gives in itself 

 evidence of being spun from the bowels of this monster, 

 then we pass from the plane of belief to that of reason 

 and science, and laugh their fantasy to scorn. 



§ 15. — Conclusions 



It may seem to the reader that we have been discussing 

 at unjustifiable length the nature of scientific law. Yet 

 therein we have reached a point of primary importance, a 

 point over which the battles of systems and creeds have 

 been long and bitter. Here the materialists have thrown 

 down the gauntlet to the natural theologians, and the 

 latter in their turn have endeavoured to deck dogma with 

 the mantle of science. The world of phenomena for the 

 materialists was an outside world unconditioned by man's 

 perceptive faculty, a world of " dead " matter subjected 

 for all time to unchangeable nomic laws (p. 95), whence 

 flowed the routine of our perceptions. The Stoics, with 

 greater insight, found these laws replete with reason, but, 

 dogmatic in turn, they postulated a reason akin to man's 

 inherent in matter. The natural theologians, like the 

 materialists, found " dead " matter, but, like the Stoics, 

 they saw strong evidence of reason in its laws ; this 

 reason they placed in an external lawgiver. Meta- 

 physician and philosopher filled the measure of obscurity 

 by hypotheses as to mind-stuff, and will and consciousness 

 which had not become consciousness, existing behind the 

 barrier of sense-impression. Science — refusing to infer 

 wildly where it cannot know, and unwilling to assume new 

 causes where the old have not yet been shown insufficient 

 — treats the " dead matter " of the materialist as a world 

 of sense-impressions. These sense-impressions appear to 

 follow an unchanging routine capable of expression in the 

 brief formulae of science because the perceptive and 

 reflective faculties are machines of practically the same 

 type in all normal human beings. Like the Stoics, the 

 scientist finds evidence of reason in his examination of 



