ON THE NOTION OF CAUSE 205 



the same laws will continue ; for at every moment laws 

 hitherto true are being falsified, though in the advanced 

 sciences these laws are less simple than those that have 

 remained true. Moreover it would be fallacious to argue 

 inductively from the state of the advanced sciences to the 

 future state of the others, for it may well be that the 

 advanced sciences are advanced simply because, hitherto, 

 their subject-matter has obeyed simple and easily 

 ascertainable laws, while the subject-matter of other 

 sciences has not done so. 



The difficulty we have been considering seems to be 

 met partly, if not wholly, by the principle that the time 

 must not enter explicitly into our formulae. All mechanical 

 laws exhibit acceleration as a function of configuration, 

 not of configuration and time jointly ; and this principle 

 of the irrelevance of the time may be extended to all 

 scientific laws. In fact we might interpret the " uni- 

 formity of nature " as meaning just this, that no scientific 

 law involves the time as an argument, unless, of course, 

 it is given in an integrated form, in which case lapse of 

 time, though not absolute time, may appear in our 

 formulae. Whether this consideration suffices to over- 

 come our difficulty completely, I do not know ; but in 

 any case it does much to diminish it. 



It will serve to illustrate what has been said if we apply 

 it to the question of free will. 



(i) Determinism in regard to the will is the doctrine 

 that our volitions belong to some deterministic system, 

 i.e. are " determined " in the sense defined above. 

 Whether this doctrine is true or false, is a mere question 

 of fact ; no a priori considerations (if our previous dis- 

 cussions have been correct) can exist on either side. On 

 the one hand, there is no a priori category of causality, 

 but merely certain observed uniformities. As a matter 



