104 SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE m 



lighten the public in respect of matters of more 

 importance than the competence of my Mentor 

 for the task which he has undertaken. 



I am not sure when the employment of the 

 word Law, in the sense in which we speak of laws 

 of nature, commenced, but examples of it may be 

 found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and 

 Spinoza. Bacon employs " Law " as the equiva- 

 lent of " Form," and I am inclined to think that 

 he may be responsible for a good deal of the 

 confusion that has subsequently arisen ; but I am 

 not aware that the term is used by other authori- 

 ties, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 

 in any other sense than that of "rule" or "definite 

 order" of the coexistence of things or succession 

 of events in nature. Descartes speaks of " regies, 

 que je nomine les lois de ]a nature/ 1 Leibnitz 

 says " loi ou regie generale," as if he considered 

 the terms interchangeable. 



The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the 

 " law of gravitation " as put forth by Newton was 

 something more than the statement of an observed 

 order. He admits that Kepler's three laws " were 

 an observed order of facts and nothing more/' 

 As to the law of gravitation, " it contains an 

 element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even 

 an element of causation, the recognition of which 

 belongs to a higher category of intellectual con- 

 ceptions than that which is concerned in the mere 

 observation and record of separate and apparently 



