THE EXPLANATION OF LAWS 89 



and has always been accompanied by the opinion that it 

 is the end and object of science to discover laws. It 

 has also been professed (especially at the end of the 

 nineteenth century) by people who know something about 

 science and actually practised it ; but I think that these 

 people only professed the view because they were afraid 

 what the philosophers might say if they denied it. At 

 any rate, for myself, I cannot understand how anybody 

 can find any interest in science, who thinks that its task 

 is completed with the discovery of laws. 



For the explanation of laws, though it is formally quite a 

 different process from the discovery of laws, is in its object 

 merely an extension of that process. We seek to discover I 

 laws in order to make nature intelligible to us ; we seek / 

 to explain them for exactly the same reason. The end 

 at which we are aiming in one process as in the other is 

 the reconciliation with out intellectual desires of the 

 perceptions forced on us by the external world of nature 

 What possible reason can be given for attaching immense 

 importance to one stage in the process and denying all 

 intrinsic importance to another ? Surely so long as 

 anything remains to be explained it is the business of 

 science to continue to seek explanations. 



THE INVENTION OF THEORIES 



And here again arises obviously a question very similar 

 to that discussed in the previous chapter. A theory, it 

 has been maintained, is some proposition which satisfies 

 these conditions : (i) It must be such that the laws whicf^ 

 it is devised to explain can be deduced from it ; (2) it 

 must explain those laws in the sense of introducing ideas 

 which are more familiar or, in some other way, mord[ 

 acceptable than those of the laws ; (3) it must predict! 

 new laws and these laws must turn out to be truer"T5f 

 course we have to ask now how such theories are w be 



