SCIENCE AND DEMONSTRATION 221 



considered apart from all actual existence of the concrete things in which they 

 are realized (206). 



The general truths of physical science, on the other hand, and of the 

 sciences which deal with phenomena dependent on the free activity of man, 

 are not inviolable in their necessity, or absolutely all-embracing in their 

 universality. They are, nevertheless, truths to which we can give a certain, 

 i.e. a steady, firm assent, because we know that the Divine interference with 

 natural agencies, being controlled by Divine Wisdom, will not be arbitrary or 

 capricious ; and that although men are free, and thus masters of their own 

 acts, they act, as a rule, not capriciously, but in accordance with their common 

 nature, as men. Hence we have grounds for &quot; generalizations &quot; or &quot; laws &quot; 

 that are physically or morally universal, and for assenting to these laws, and 

 to their applications, with physical or moral certitude. 



We can be certain that physical laws are necessarily true in this hypo 

 thetical sense, i.e. that they must hold good contingently on the Divine Will 

 and Wisdom ; and that no other necessity attaches to themselves or their 

 applications besides the consequent necessity of obeying the Divine Fiat (219). 

 It is in vain that scientist or philosopher, agnostic or monist, endeavours to 

 attach an absolute or essential necessity to the domain of contingent existential 

 fact. Physical laws have only a hypothetical necessity ; and this necessity 

 receives a rational explanation only in the philosophy of theism which re 

 cognizes the universe as a contingent reality, freely created, conserved, and 

 governed, by the Power and Wisdom of a Necessary Being. The absolute, 

 logical necessity, claimed for physical laws by the philosophy of monistic 

 idealism, has no ground in common sense or everyday experience, and remains 

 enshrouded in a mist of mystery (224). 1 The world of sense experience furnishes 

 adequate grounds for proving the existence of a Necessary Intelligence and 

 Will, distinct from itself. The monism of Hegel and his followers interprets 

 this same world as the purely intellectual manifestation of a necessary, self- 

 existent mind or idea. In its exclusive attachment to the conceptually abstract, 

 universal^ and necessary relations, established by our intellects between the 

 objects of our thought-processes, monism loses sight of the other great aspect 

 of reality its phenomenal aspect, reality as revealed to our senses. But in 

 the light of sense experience we are forced to believe that what actually exists 

 is not abstract but concrete, not universal but individual (6), not unique but 

 manifold. Of these things or realities our intellects can gain true, though 

 inadequate, knowledge by the system of universal thought-relations which it 



x This applies equally to the &quot;mechanical&quot; necessity ascribed by Empiricists 

 to the processes and laws of nature. It is no ultimate explanation of this necessity 

 to say that it is &quot; mechanical &quot;. If all nature is merely one vast machine or 

 mechanism, who made it ? The necessity we ascribe to the course of actual nature 

 in time and space is not the necessity we ascribe to abstract judgments about 

 possible essences : it is not purely intellectual. The only immediate source it can 

 have is our experience of the order, regularity, uniformity of all nature, compelling 

 us to interpret the latter as a Cosmos, as the work of an Omnipotent Will directed 

 by Supreme Wisdom. The only necessity for which we can rationally account in 

 actual nature is that by which it pursues the course marked out for it by the Divine 

 Fiat. To say as a last word about the course of nature that it is &quot; mechanical,&quot; is 

 scarcely any better than to ascribe it to mere chance, or to pronounce it an insoluble 

 enigma. 



