THE LAWS OF NATURE. a 



By S. P. Langley. 



We say that nature is unchanging, and so perhaps it is, in the eye 

 of some eternal being, but not in ours, for the things that we see from 

 day to day, appear permanent only by comparison to the duration of 

 our own brief life, and our own little experience. 



An inhabitant of the land where nature has just passed through such 

 an awful convulsion, with a loss of life greater for so short a time 

 than history has ever recorded, might have said in '.he morning that 

 nature never changes, because it had never changed in his own little 

 experience; but he would not have said so at that day's close. Now 

 the experience of the entire human race is far briefer relative to 

 nature's duration than that of one of these islanders, who knew the 

 green mountain with its fresh lakes only as a place of quiet rest up to 

 the moment when the gates of hell were opened beneath it. 



Nature, then, really changes, and would apparently do so if man 

 were not here; for it is not man's varying thoughts about nature that 

 make her change. But there is something quite different from nature 

 which does change because of man, and which apparently would not 

 change if he were not here. This is what he calls the ; laws of nature.' 

 The assumption that there are such things is due to him, and such 

 'laws' are known only through his mind, in which alone nature is 

 seen. 



It is perhaps an hard saying to most that there are no such things 

 as "laws of nature 1 ; but this is the theme on which I have to speak. 



These, then, are the laws of his own mind, or the effects of his own 

 mind, which he projects outside of himself and imagines to be due to 

 some permanent and unalterable cause having an independent existence; 

 and this, not only because his season for observation is but a moment in 

 the passage of nature's eternal year, but because with his pathetic sense 

 of his own weakness, he would gladly stay himself on the word of some 

 unchanging being. It is because this sense of dependence is strangely 

 joined with such self-conceit that when he listens to what he himself 

 says, he calls it the voice of God. From these twin causes, arising both 

 from his inability as a creature of time to observe what is eternal, and 



!l A paper read before the Philosophical Society of Washington, May 10, 1902. 

 SM 1901 35 545 



