no THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



Greater and Ruler, whose existence and providence can be proved from &quot; the 

 facts of our experience &quot; : to us the principle means that &quot; The course of 

 physical nature must be uniform if, and provided that, and in so far as, the 

 will of God makes it so &quot;. If, then, we wish to formulate an ultimate, uncon 

 ditional, or absolutely necessary, law, for physical nature, or indeed for all 

 contingent reality, we shall find it in the simple statement that &quot;The whole 

 course of contingent or created reality must be as God, the Necessary Being, 

 wills it to be &quot;. If we accept J. S. Mill s definition of laws of nature in the 

 strict sense, as &quot; the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, 

 the whole existing order of nature would result &quot; ; * the law we have just enun 

 ciated would be the really ultimate &quot;law of nature,&quot; though this was very far 

 indeed from Mill s own thought. We have already referred to Mill s in 

 ability to transcend the &quot; conditional,&quot; or to give any account of the nature of 

 that ultimate, outstanding condition on which &quot;the present constitution of 

 things &quot; 3 is dependent. Let us see whether Mr. Joseph is any more expli 

 cit in regard to the nature of this final and most important condition. 



Understanding a law to be unconditional when its truth is not dependent 

 on any outstanding condition other than those explicitly stated in the formula 

 tion of the law, 3 he goes on to inquire : &quot; are there any unconditional laws 

 known to us?&quot; 4 . He first refers to the mechanical view of the physical 

 universe, which purports to interpret and explain &quot; all physical changes &quot; as 

 &quot;determined altogether according to physical laws,&quot; and to be all &quot;purely 

 mechanical&quot;: 5 according to which view these mechanical laws, while con 

 ditioning the existence and course of all physical nature, would be themselves 

 unconditional. He very rightly declines to accept this view on the ground 

 that it is &quot; impossible to account on physical principles for the facts, of conscious 

 ness &quot; 8 . . . &quot; Thus to a physical theory of the world consciousness remains 

 unaccountable ; such a theory therefore cannot be complete or final &quot;. 7 He then 

 suggests in a mild way that &quot; we are perhaps sometimes too hasty in supposing 

 that we see the necessary truth of physical principles &quot;. 8 Such a supposition 

 is, of course, not only too hasty, but also erroneous, seeing that such principles, 

 referring as they do to the order of concrete physical facts, cannot have the 

 purely abstract necessity of mathematical truths : &quot; it might be said that in 

 the first law of motion it is self-evident indeed that a body will persist in its 

 state of rest or uniform rectilinear motion until something interferes with it, 

 but not that interference can come only from another body ; that the mathe 

 matical reasoning in physical science is necessary, but not the physical prin 

 ciples which supply the data to which mathematical reasoning is applied ; 

 and that the doctrine that a body can only be interfered with by another body 

 is one of these &quot;. 9 All this points to the conclusion that &quot; the fundamental 

 physical laws are only conditionally true,&quot; 10 that is, dependent on conditions 



1 Logic, III., iv., i. * Logic, III., v., 6: cf. supra, 219. 



3 JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 381. 4 p. 382. *ibid. 9 ibid. 7 p. 384. 8 ibid. 



9 p. 385 (italics are ours, except the last). The assertion that &quot; a body can only 

 be interfered with by another body &quot; is not really a physical &quot;principle,&quot; nor can 

 physics even prove it to be true : what it is meant to convey is simply this, that 

 &quot;physical science prescinds from all but material agencies &quot; (Cf. MAKER, Psychology, 

 p. 518, n. 30), 



&quot;ibid. 



