1 36 Heredity. 



gravitation, etc. But in this analysis the fact has crumbled away, 

 vanished, ceased to be, and has left in its stead nothing but a 

 group of laws. 



If we take a biological fact, a flowering plant, a respiratory 

 animal, there again we find only a sum of laws. First, there are 

 the laws of inorganic mattei ; and, indeed, if we reduce life to pure 

 mechanism, there are no others. But if, on the contrary, we hold 

 that physics and chemistry fail to explain life in its entirety, we 

 bring in other laws, those governing assimilation, disintegration, 

 generation, and all the vital processes ; and although we have as 

 yet no precise knowledge of these laws, we do not doubt that 

 they exist 



So, too, with the moral world. A passion, a poem, a historical 

 event, a revolution, result from the grouping of an almost infinite 

 number of laws. For, beyond the physical and biologic laws 

 which they presuppose, they imply also psychological, economical, 

 and social laws. The simplest moral fact presents such a compli- 

 cation, such a tangle of laws, themselves but ill-understood, that 

 many men, unable to recognize them, have chosen rather to deny 

 them. But each new advance of science discredits this solution ; 

 and, although it is possible that beyond this general reference to 

 law there may exist something which is not subject to it, still we 

 may affirm that every fact, considered as such, is a grouping of 

 laws. 



Let us suppose all the facts of the physical and moral universe 

 reduced to a thousand secondary laws, and these to a dozen 

 primitive laws, which are the final and irreducible elements of the 

 world ; let us represent each by a thread of peculiar colour, itself 

 formed of a collection of finer threads ; a superior force God, 

 Nature, Chance, it matters not what is ever weaving, knotting and 

 unknotting these, and transforming them into various patterns. To 

 the ordinary mind there is nothing besides these knots and these 

 patterns ; for it these are the only reality beyond them it knows 

 nothing, suspects nothing. But the man of science sets to work : 

 h,e unties the knots, unravels the patterns, and shows that all the 

 reality is in the threads. Then the antagonism between fact and 

 law disappears ; facts are but a synthesis of laws, laws an analysis 

 of facts. 



