THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE 183 



nature, and so has as corollary Mill's ultimate premise. So important 

 and complex is this corollary that I will treat it as a separate principle. 



The Principle of Continuity 



Heraclitus found in nature no continuity beyond that of absolute flux, 

 continuous nonrecurrence. And even of those Greeks who descried a 

 stable order in nature, Sambursky finds few who conceived the extent 

 of that order as Anaxagoras did. 



Anaxagoras' astronomical hypotheses are throughout dominated by a 

 "terrestrial" approach which makes no distinction between phenom- 

 ena "there" in the sky and those "here" on the earth, and gives a 

 purely physical evaluation of astronomical data and their possible 

 causes. The heavenly bodies are nothing more than flaming stones; 

 "the sun is larger than the Peloponnesus"— what uninhibited freedom 

 of thought is revealed by this comparison of the mightiest of the celes- 

 tial bodies, apotheosized by the deep-rooted irrational beliefs of myth- 

 ology, with a geographical object, a part of the inhabited earth! 



Some two millennia were yet to pass before this view would find its 

 match, and consummation, in Isaac Newton. Extending his concepts 

 to earth and cosmos (and hypothetical microcosm) alike, Newton 

 acts always on this premise: 



This is the quality of all bodies within the reach of our experiments; 

 and therefore . . . to be aflirmed of all bodies whatsoever. 



To this conception of continuity Newton attached so much impor- 

 tance that he makes of it a second Rule of Reasoning, corollary to the 

 first. Conceiving nature as "wont to be simple and always consonant 

 to itself," Newton takes it as a matter of principle that: 



Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, 

 assign the same causes. As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the 

 descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary 

 fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the 

 planets. 



Newton's successors applaud, and act upon, this principle— holding 

 its soundness attested by Newton's successes and their own. By those 

 successes ( and co-ordinate failures ) we have, indeed, been taught a 

 revulsion from uniqueness and abruptness that carries us far beyond 



