60 WITHIN AND WITHOUT 



lies in the application of the term " Law." The 

 Ten Commandments, and our familiar friend 

 D. O.K. A. , are laws we must obey or take the 

 consequences of our disobedience. The " laws " 

 which the writer is dealing with are not any- 

 thing of this kind. Newton's Law is not a thing 

 made by Newton, but an orderly system of events 

 which was in existence long before Newton's 

 time, but was first demonstrated by him. It 

 tells us how a certain part of the system works 

 when we are " inside it" It does not in the least 

 explain the system any more than the discovery 

 of the resiliency of the spring of the watch explains 

 the watch itself. So far from dispensing with 

 " the activities of a guiding power," Newton's 

 law is positively clamant for a final explanation, 

 since it does not tell us, nor does it pretend to tell 

 us, how the " law " came into existence, still less 

 how the planets came to be there, or how they 

 happen to be in a state of motion at all. Writers 

 of this kind never seem to have grasped the 

 significance of such simple matters as the different 

 kinds of causes, or to be aware that a formal cause 

 is not an efficient cause, and that neither of them 

 is a final cause. Coming to the latter part of the 

 paragraph, it is in no way proved that instincts can 

 be reduced to physico-chemical laws, and, suppose 

 it were proved, the assumption of design would 

 be exactly where it is at this moment. It is the 

 old story of St. Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna 

 and their discussion on abiogenesis, and surely 

 biologists might be expected to have heard of that. 

 The same confusion of thought is to be met with 



