82 The Bible of Nature 



thunderstorm and the dew-drop, the subUme ar- 

 chitecture of the mountains and the evanescent 

 beauty of the frost-flowers on the window pane. 

 It surely shows us that we Hve in a universe not 

 a multiverse, if such things be so; the very fact that 

 the world is scientifically intelligible shows that 

 there is a rational unity behind it; it surely shows 

 us that Man is no freak of nature who can hold 

 the earth in a balance and measure the heavens 

 in his scale. Strictly speaking, science rede- 

 scribes and reconstructs by means of symbols^ 

 conceptual formulae — such as matter, electricity, 

 ether, gravitation, chemical affinity. There must 

 be the counterfoils of reality in these, else science 

 would not work out practically as it does; we could 

 not trust it and predict by means of it as we do. 

 But a law of nature is no longer regarded by any 

 scientific man as a necessity which things have to 

 obey; it is rather a summary expression of certain 

 constancies of scientific experience. 



Strictly speaking, as regards inanimate nature, 

 science finds no true causes. It is a mechanical 

 axiom that what is in the results was also in the 

 conditions, and what science is continually doing 

 is to show that one particular collocation of matter 

 and energy passes into another. Sometimes the 

 resultant is obviously just the components over 

 again and no further explanation is needed or 

 possible; in many cases, however, science has 



