1892. 



THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE. 303 



In the next chapter, on The Scientific Law, a distinction is drawn, 

 first, between the laws of nature and civil laws, and, secondly, between 

 natural Imv, descriptive of the normal order of sequence in perception, 

 and scientific laiv, the product of our conceptual thought as exercised 

 on the materials given through the normal routine of perception. 

 This latter distinction answers fairly well to that between what Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer calls the laws of phenomena and the laws of the 

 factors of phenomena. The former are general but concrete ; the 

 latter general and abstract. We must, however, pass over this 

 chapter and that which follows (on Cause and Effect, and Proba- 

 bility) without further comment, though we could break a lance 

 with Mr. Pearson on the grounds of his statement that " among the 

 myriad planetary systems we see on a clear night, there surely must 

 be myriad planets which have reached our own stage of development, 

 and teem, or have teemed, with human life." It may be so. But 

 seeing how enormously complex are the influences which have con- 

 spired to bring about man as the crowning product of evolution on 

 this earth, we should judge it to be indefinitely improbable that 

 human beings, as such, have been evolved on any one of these 

 myriad planets. 



The succeeding chapter on Space and Time is an important one. 

 Space is described as the mode in which we perceive co- existing 

 things apart, while time is the mode in which we perceive successive 

 things apart. Mr. Pearson illustrates this Kantian contention by an 

 analogy. The letters of the alphabet may be said to have a real 

 existence, like the groups of sense-impressions we term objects ; but 

 the order of the letters is merely the mode in which we perceive them 

 to co-exist as an alphabet. Space, in like manner, is an order or 

 mode of perceiving objects ; but it has no more existence if objects 

 are withdrawn than the alphabet would have if there were no letters. 

 So, too, with time. " Let the reader endeavour to realise empty 

 time, or time with no sequence of events, and he will soon be ready 

 to grant that time is a mode of his own perception, and is limited by 

 the contents of his experience." Now", it may at once be granted 

 that, in the absence of the sense-impressions which, for example, 

 now suggest to me the percept which I call my clock, I could not 

 recognise it as an object extended and distant ; and that in the 

 absence of the ticking sounds I could not recognise them as succes- 

 sive. But surely that is not the question. The question is whether, 

 given certain sense-impressions which suggest the percept clock, 

 there are any objective relationships which I can describe by using 

 the adjectives distant, extended, and successive. I am prepared to 

 maintain that the relationships which I thus describe are just as 

 objective as are the sense-impressions themselves. Neither they nor 

 the sense-impressions have any existence, as such, in the absence of 

 the percipient mind. Biit whatever objective existence may be 

 predicated of the sense-impressions, may be predicated also of their 



