180 WHAT IS SCIENCE? 



is absolutely invariable, unchanging, universal. We 

 may not always be successful in finding such laws, but 

 our firm belief that they are to be found never wavers ; 

 we never have the smallest reason to abandon our funda- 

 mental conviction that all events and changes, except 

 in so far as they are the direct outcome of volition (and 

 therefore immediately controllable), can be analysed into, 

 and interpreted by, laws of the strictest form. It is only 

 those who are guided by such a conviction that can hope 

 to bring order and form into the infinite complexity of 

 everyday experience. 



However, such a conviction by itself would probably 

 be of little avail. If we only knew from the outset that 

 the analysis and explanation of experience could not be 

 effected, except by disentangling from it the strict laws 

 of science, every fresh problem would probably have to 

 await solution until it came to the notice of some great 

 genius ; for, as we noticed before, the discovery of a 

 wholly new law is one of the greatest achievements of 

 mankind. But we know much more ; the long series of 

 laws which have been discovered, indicate where new 

 laws are to be sought. We know that the terms involved 

 in a new law must themselves be associated by a law. 

 Moreover, the laws which define terms involved in other 

 laws, though numerous, form a well-recognized class ; 

 there are the laws defining various kinds of substances 

 or various species of living beings, those defining forces, 

 volumes, electric currents, the many forces of energy, 

 and all the various measurable quantities of physics ; 

 a complete list of them would fill a text-book, and yet 

 their number is finite and comprehended by all serious 

 students of the branches of science in which they are 

 involved. Such students know that, when they try to 

 analyse and explain new experience, it is between a 

 definite class of terms that the necessary laws must be 

 sought ; and that knowledge reduces the problem to 



