22 THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 



turn"; for why, the resultant is just another form of the 

 components. In the great majority of cases, however, where 

 there is a qualitative change, we know that a given colloca- 

 tion of matter and energy gives rise to another, and does 

 so uniformly, but we cannot tell why the resultant must be 

 as it is and not otherwise. In the great majority of cases all 

 that science can say is, " If this, then that " ; and it is a 

 very useful thing to be able to say. 



Every one knows that oxygen and hydrogen will unite vio- 

 lently to form water, but all that we can say is that it is their 

 nature to. Perhaps it may be explained as due to " the in- 

 terplay between electricity and matter ", and then we shall 

 shift the pegs of our claim in the desert of ignorance. 



We rub our eyes and say : " But surely it is the very 

 business of Science to show how things happen, to explain 

 occurrences." So in a sense it is, but as Professor Stout 

 puts it, " What is really done is to show that a given result, 

 often called an. effect, is part of a continuous process which 

 includes a known antecedent, often called the cause." In- 

 deed, " the current scientific conception of a cause " is the 

 " totality of the conditions in the presence of which an event 

 occurs and in the absence of any member of which it does not 

 occur" (Taylor, 1909, p. 170). 



(;') Finally there is a sense in which science, if not 

 asymptotic, is bound for a long time to remain approximate. 

 The Universe is still unfathomed. 



(1) A scientific law formulates an observed routine in 

 the order of nature, but sometimes it is only a provisional 



fit . Residual phenomena emerge which lead to restate- 

 ment So Kepler improves on Copernicus, and Newton on 

 Kepler. 



(2) Even when the 'fit' of the formulation is more 



