Ill 



PHYSICAL LAWS 231 



one on another a certain number of times. Nature did 

 not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, 

 nor does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, 

 relates &quot;quantitative&quot; variations to one another to 

 obtain laws, and it succeeds. Its success would be 

 inexplicable, if the movement which constitutes materi 

 ality were not the same movement which, prolonged 

 by us to its end, that is to say, to homogeneous space, 

 results in making us count, measure, follow in their 

 respective variations terms that are functions one of 

 another. To effect this prolongation of the movement, 

 our intellect has only to let itself go, for it runs 

 naturally to space and mathematics, intellectuality and 

 materiality being of the same nature and having been 

 produced in the same way. 



If the mathematical order were a positive thing, if 

 there were, immanent in matter, laws comparable to 

 those of our codes, the success of our science would 

 have in it something of the miraculous. What chances 

 should we have indeed of finding the standard of nature 

 and of isolating exactly, in order to determine their 

 reciprocal relations, the very variables which nature has 

 chosen ? But the success of a science of mathematical 

 form would be no less incomprehensible, if matter did 

 not already possess everything necessary to adapt itself 

 to our formulae. One hypothesis only, therefore, 

 remains plausible, namely, that the mathematical order 

 is nothing positive, that it is the form toward which 

 a certain interruption tends of itself, and that materiality 

 consists precisely in an interruption of this kind. We 

 shall understand then why our science is contingent, 

 relative to the variables it has chosen, relative to the 

 order in which it has successively put the problems, 

 and why nevertheless it succeeds. It might have been, 



