78 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



which must remain unaltered so long as certain conditions are ful 

 filled. This, in fact, is the only necessity experience warrants us 

 in attributing to the sequences of nature ; and, as we shall 

 presently see, Mill s so-called &quot; unconditional &quot; invariability re 

 mained always ultimately &quot; conditional &quot;. 



How, then, it may be asked, from actual, limited experience of unvaried 

 sequence in the past, can we get the idea of a sequence that is invariable i.e. 

 which &quot; cannot &quot; vary, which is &quot; necessary &quot; ? Let us first recall the tradi 

 tional Scholastic account of &quot; physical necessity,&quot; which is simple and intelli 

 gible. &quot; Necessity &quot; may be either intellectual, hypothetical, abstract, 

 connecting possible essences together in thought ; or it may be volitional, 

 categorical, concrete, connecting actual things or occurrences together in 

 reality. With this latter we are concerned here. When we speak of &quot; that 

 which must be &quot; in reference to things or events, when we say that one thing 

 must follow another, we can only mean that they are so constituted and 

 circumstanced that by their very nature or constitution, and collocation, they 

 cannot help following each other. 1 Whatever Mill may say, no mere addition 

 or multiplication of &quot; was &quot; and &quot; is &quot; and &quot; will be &quot; can ever generate an 

 absolute or unconditional &quot; must be &quot;. What is there, then, in the observed 

 unvaried uniformity of nature in the past, to warrant us in thinking not only 

 that it will, but that it must, continue unvaried ? There is this : there is abundant 

 evidence (of which the fact of observed uniformity itself forms a part) to warrant 

 us in concluding with certitude that nature is the work of an All-Wise Creator 

 and Ruler, who has so constituted and arranged its agencies that they will and 

 must continue to exist and act, each in its own fixed, uniform way, as long as 

 He chooses in His wisdom to preserve and sustain it in existence. Such is 

 the uniformity, invariability, necessity, we ascribe to physical agencies : condi 

 tional on the Will of an All-Wise, All-Ruling Providence. 2 There is the ulti 

 mate rational basis which analysis of human experience reveals for wx physical, 

 conditional certitude about the general laws of physical science. 



Now let us observe and contrast the alternative offered by the empiricist 

 philosophy of Mill and his school. The physical cause of a phenomenon, he 

 writes, is that which has always &quot; been followed by &quot; that phenomenon in past 

 experience, provided this experience does not leave any &quot; room for a pos 

 sibility that the known cases may not correctly represent all possible cases &quot;. 

 But if, as Mill s own philosophy teaches, we have no faculties of knowledge 

 beyond our external and internal senses, whose only objects are sense- 

 phenomena, associated, compounded, and otherwise modified in consciousness, 

 how can the combination of past and present sense experience give us any 



1 We abstract here, for the sake of simplicity, from the conditional necessity, 

 called moral obligation, to which the conduct of free, responsible agents is subject. To 

 these the Creator has given the power to act as they choose ; but He imposes on 

 them a necessity by which they must (freely choose to) act in a certain way if they 

 are to attain their end. But every non-free cause in animal, vegetable, and inor 

 ganic creation, He has endowed with such a nature and constitution as categorically 

 directs it to attain the end He has freely intended it to reach. 



2 For a fuller development of these views on the necessity of physical laws and 

 causes, cf. infra, Chap. IV., 224. 



