THE EXPLANATION OF LAWS 89 



and has always been accompanied by the opinion that it 

 is the end and object of science to discover laws. It 

 has also been professed (especially at the end of the 

 nineteenth century) by people who know something about 

 science and actually practised it ; but I think that these 

 people only professed the view because they were afraid 

 what the philosophers might say if they denied it. At 

 any rate, for myself, I cannot understand how anybody 

 can find any interest in science, who thinks that its task 

 is completed with the discovery of laws. 



For the explanation of laws, though it is formally quite a 



different process from the discovery of laws, is in its object 



merely an extension of that process. We seek to discover 



in order to make nature intelligible to us ; we seek 



to explain them for exactly the same reason. The end 



at \s are aiming in one process as in the other is 



the reconciliation with out intellectual desires of the 



perceptions forced on us by the external world of nature 



t possible reason can be given for attaching immense 



rtance to one stage in the process and denying all 



intrinsic importance to another ? Surely so long as 



anything remains to be explained it is the business of 



science to continue to seek explanations. 



THE INVENTION OF THEORIES 



And here again arises obviously a question very similar 

 iat discussc< -. . A theory, it 



ie proposition whirl i 

 : (i) ll must be such that tin- Kiws * 



be deduced from it ; (j) it 

 in the sense of intn>du< i 

 r or, in some 01 



<-c of tip it must predict 



out to be true. Of 



.LOW how such theories are to be 



