

FIRST PRINCIPLES 15 



depression, activity and relaxation. We cannot measure 

 love or hate, or duty in calories, or foot-pounds, or amperes, 

 or any other units, and when we enter the realm in which 

 emotions hold sway we have to leave our science behind. 

 Perhaps this is the mistake which certain French psychol- 

 ogists, who look upon man, body and mind, as merely the 

 product of his environment, have made. They regard him 

 as a machine which responds in a rational way to every 

 impinging force, whereas experience tells us that even the 

 sterner sex seldom transmits the stimuli a-(-4+6 as an action 

 equal to 12. An emotional bias almost always prevents us 

 from working out the sum aright. No two persons obtain 

 exactly the same result. 



Science cannot penetrate into the world of consciousness. 

 The writer of " Natural Law in the Spiritual World " showed 

 a singular misconception of the meaning of the word law, as 

 well as an inability to interpret either nature or spirit. 



" There is," he said, "a sense of solidity about a Law of 

 Nature which belongs to nothing else in the world. ' ' But a 

 law is nothing more than a docket into which we collect 

 phenomena which have something in common. When it is 

 discovered that certain facts are not isolated, but that they 

 are similar to certain other facts, they are united into a group 

 which is held together by the character which they possess 

 in common, and the statement that they all possess this 

 character is enunciated as a "law." Early man discovered 

 the law that stones fall to the ground ; later it was discovered 

 that water "seeks its own level ; " that a heavy body when 

 immersed in fluid displaces a bulk of fluid equal to its own 

 bulk ; that the moon remains at a fixed distance from the 

 earth. All these apparently diverse phenomena fall into a 

 group. We therefore tie them up with the same tape and 

 put them into a docket labelled "law of gravitation." If 

 asked for a definition of the Law of Gravitation, we state 

 that "Gravity is a universal property of matter, in virtue of 

 which every body gravitates to every other body ; and the 



