18 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



for the phenomena in question. When two or more com- 

 paratively specific laws are, in this latter sense, incapable of 

 being deduced from any common, more general law — in other 

 words, are not, thus far, unified — we may speak of those laws 

 as being discontinuous with one another. 



Though I wish to avoid overloading this lecture with 

 logical distinctions, it is necessary to add that there is another 

 way in which laws may be discontinuous — -namely (to put it 

 loosely and untechnically) when they refer to phenomena so 

 different in kind that there is no possibility that the laws 

 should conflict. For example, the law of the conservation of 

 energy is probably realized both in the action of the clock 

 and the action of the monkey ; but you cannot deduce from it 

 either the laws of mechanics and the particular consequences 

 of those laws in the case of the clock's motion, or the laws of 

 physiology and the particular consequences of those laws in 

 the case of the monkey's motions. In other words, both these 

 latter laws, and the individual phenomena falling under them, 

 conform to the principle of conservation, but do not follow 

 from it. And the reason is that the law of the conservation 

 of energy has, of itself, nothing specific to say about the direc- 

 tions of motion or the relative positions of bodies at any given 

 time ; no direction of motion in a body, therefore, can possibly 

 conflict with, or limit the universal truth of, that law. But 

 the laws of mechanics and the laws of physiology both relate 

 to the motions and relative positions of portions of matter. 

 Their discontinuity with one another, then — if they should 

 finally be found to be irresolubly discontinuous — would mean, 

 not simply that one did not follow from the other, or from 

 any common law, but also that one restricted the scope of the 

 other — that when a bit of matter becomes part of a living 

 organism, it begins to move according to laws which do not 

 correctly describe the uniformities of the motion of inorganic 

 matter. In such a case, there would be no one law from 

 which (given the additional information it calls for) all 

 special cases of motion could be deduced, but two entirely dis- 



