72 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 



recent writer in the saying that if the a priori and 

 transcendental basis of morals be abandoned &quot; we 

 shall have merely the same certainty that now ex 

 ists in physics and chemistry &quot; ! Elsewhere lurks 

 the apprehension that the progress of scientific 

 method will deliver the purposive freedom of man 

 bound hand and foot to the fatal decrees of iron 

 necessity, called natural law. The notion that 

 / laws govern and forces rule is an animistic sur 

 vival. It is a product of reading nature in terms 

 of politics in order to turn around and then read 

 politics in the light of supposed sanctions of na 

 ture. This idea passed from medieval theology 

 into the science of Newton, to whom the universe 

 was the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were 

 the laws of nature. From Newton it passed into 

 the deism of the eighteenth century, whence it mi 

 grated into the philosophy of the Enlightenment, 

 to make its last stand in Spencer s philosophy of 

 the fixed environment and the static goal. 



No, nature is not an unchangeable order, un 

 winding itself majestically from the reel of law 

 under the control of deified forces. It is an in 

 definite congeries of changes. Laws are not gov 

 ernmental regulations which limit change, but are 

 convenient formulations of selected portions of 

 change followed through a longer or shorter period 

 of time, and then registered in statistical forms 

 that are amenable to mathematical manipulation. 



