546 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 



again from his own overweening sense of his own capacitj^ he looks 

 for some immutable being whom he believes to have written man's 

 own ideas in what ho calls 'the book of nature.' 



I am not questioning the existence of such a ])eing as the 'Author of 

 Nature' ; but asking if such a volume as is imputed to him, ever really 

 existed. The very phrase, ' book of nature' is a legacy from moribund 

 mediaeval notions of a lawgiver; and it, with the vitality of words 

 which carry to us dying ideas, has lived on to our own time, when we 

 can no longer believe it, although it is still upon our lips, and to con- 

 vince ourselves of this we need only pause a moment to ask the 

 simple question whether there is any authority who has prepared a 

 clearly written book of statutes, in which we can really read nature's 

 laws. 



The question answers itself. 



I repeat that I am not den3dng here the existence of such a being as 

 the imputed author of these laws, but say that, ignorant as we are of 

 what is being done by him, we cannot read his thoughts in our 

 momentary vision of what is forever passing. 



"For m}'' thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways 

 my ways, saith the Lord," is a caution which, whether believers or not, 

 would not harm us to consider; and when we say that these ' thoughts' 

 are written in 'the book of nature,' this cannot mean that they are 

 legible there as in a statute book where he who runs may read. If 

 nature is to be compared to a book at all, it is to a ))ook in the hands of 

 infants to whom it conveys little meaning, for such are we; or rather 

 it is like a 'book of celestial hieroglyphs, of which even prophets are 

 happy that they can read here a line and there a line.' 



T hope what I am trying to say may not bear the appearance of 

 some metaphysical refinement on common sense. It is common sense 

 that is intended, and the 'laws of nature' that seem to me to be a 

 metaphysical phrase. 



To decorate our own guesses at nature's meaning with this name 

 is a presumption due to our own feelile human nature, which we can 

 forgive for demanding something more permanent than itself, but 

 which also leads us to have such an exalted conceit of our own opinions, 

 as to hide from ourselves that it is these very opinions which we call 

 nature's laws. 



The history of the past shows that once, most philosophers, even 

 atheists, thus regarded the 'Laws of Nature,' not as their own inter- 

 pretations of her, but as something external to themselves, as entities 

 partaking the attributes of Deity— entities which they deified in print 

 with capital letters — as we sometimes do still, though these 'Laws' 

 now are shorn of 'the glories of their birth and state' which they 

 once wore, and are not turning out to be 'substantial things.' 



But are there not really things (like the fact of gravitation, for 



