58 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



the laws of men, which are enforced by police power; the laws 

 of God, which are thought to be enforced by supernatural 

 authority. 



When a scientist speaks of a law, the public thinks that, if 

 the law is disobeyed, some penalty will follow. But a scien- 

 tific law is not an order which must be obeyed; it is a state- 

 ment of fact. There is no way of obeying or disobeying it, 

 and since disobedience is impossible, there is no penalty. 

 The so-called laws of health can be disobeyed; they are state- 

 ments of desirable action that have been formulated. But 

 the law of gravity cannot be defied. If a man jumps out of 

 a window and is caught in a net, he is not defying the law of 

 gravity; he is acting according to the law of gravity. 



The feeling that there is some connection between natural 

 law and divine law has given rise to the idea that, in his 

 establishment of laws^ the scientist is approaching some form 

 of absolute truth— that the whole process of scientific re- 

 search, in fact, is the uncovering of truth and, if we only 

 knew enough, we should be able to approach to a knowledge 

 of absolute truth concerning all things. This idea leads to 

 the personification of the existence of nature^ an order of 

 things external to ourselves concerning which generalizations 

 may be made. Such a personification is often to be found in 

 the writings of scientific men, especially those written for lay- 



to antiquity. The divine lawgiver is the central idea of Judaism, and 

 since God in addition is the creator of the world, it is easy to under- 

 stand that the idea arose of his having prescribed certain prohibitions 

 to the physical world. Thus Job says that God made a law for the rain. 

 In classical antiquity also is to be found the idea that physical processes 

 are enforced by gods. 



The term law was used by Francis Bacon as synonymous with form, 

 and Bacon probably derived the term from the Bible. Kepler used the 

 word to some extent, and Descartes adopted the whole concept of nat- 

 ural law referring to the laws that God has put into nature, arguing, in 

 fact, that natural laws must be immutable because God and his opera- 

 tions are perfect and immutable. The word in its present sense owes 

 its popularity primarily to its adoption by Newton, who, however, used 

 the term without any tinge of metaphysics and simply as the description 

 of a phenomenon. 



