RESULTS AND LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 437 



fibres, but something requires to be added to our sciences 

 in order that we even explain these subtle phenomena. 



Now there is absolutely nothing in science or in scien- 

 tific method to warrant us in assigning any limit to this 

 hierarchy of laws. When in many undoubted cases we 

 find law overriding law, and at certain points in our 

 experience producing unexpected results, we can never 

 venture to affirm that we have exhausted the strange 

 phenomena which may have been provided for in the 

 original constitution of matter. The Universe might 

 have been so designed that it should for long intervals 

 go through the same round of almost unvaried existence, 

 and yet so that events of exceptional character should 

 from time to time be produced. Charles Babbage showed 

 in that most profound and eloquent work, ' The Ninth 

 Bridgwater Treatise/ that it was theoretically possible 

 for human artists to design a machine, consisting of 

 metallic wheels and levers, which should work invari- 

 ably by one simple law of action during any finite 

 number of steps, and yet at a fixed moment, however 

 distant, should manifest a single breach of law. Such 

 an engine might go on counting, for instance, the natural 

 numbers until they might reach a number requiring for 

 its expression a hundred million digits. ' If every letter 

 in the volume now before the reader's eyes,' says Babbage 6 , 

 ' were changed into a figure, and if all the figures con- 

 tained in a thousand such volumes were arranged in order, 

 the whole together would yet fall far short of the vast 

 induction the observer would have had in favour of the 

 truth of the law of natural numbers . . . Yet shall the 

 engine, true to the prediction of its director, after the 

 lapse of myriads of ages, fulfil its task, and give that one, 

 the first and only exception to that time-sanctioned law. 

 What would have been the chances against the appear- 

 e 'Ninth Bridgwater Treatise/ p. 140. 



