498 SCIENCE. 
dice is inevitably and absolutely the result of the 
initial conditions. This is the teaching of 
philosophers. What the naturalist asserts is 
that the ‘initial conditions’ are signs which 
mean that he may expect the dice fall. So far 
as his scanty and imperfect knowledge of nature 
extends, all dice thus placed have thus fallen, 
and he has reasonable confidence—confidence 
so reasonable in this case that we call it moral 
certainty—that dice will continue so to do, 
since the after course of all the dice he has 
thrown has been neither more nor less than 
what the initial conditions would have led one 
to expect. 
Ward says that he has tried, in his first lec- 
ture, to present ‘‘an outline sketch of that 
polity of many mansions, which we may call the 
Kingdom of the Sciences, and the mental at- 
mosphere in which its citizens live’’; but the 
mental atmosphere which is here presented is 
one in which few of these citizens would care to 
pass their lives, however wholesome the phil- 
osophers may find it. 
Thus we are told, P. 13—‘‘as to material 
phenomena, certain mechanical laws are held 
to be supreme ; that a single atom should devi- 
ate from its predetermined course were as much 
a miracle as if Jupiter should break away from 
its orbit and set the whole system in commo- 
tion.”’ 
So far as I understand the mental atmosphere 
of the men of science, and may be permitted to 
speak for them, they assert that nothing can 
deviate from natural law, since nature is neither 
more nor less than that which is. 
Scientific law involves no notion of suprem- 
acy, since it is nothing more than a statement 
of observed facts, joined to reasonable confi- 
dence—confidence which is more or less reason- 
able according to knowledge—what we may 
expect under certain conditions. _ As Berkeley 
has expréssed it, natural laws are ‘‘ general 
rules, which teach us how to act and what to 
expect.’’ 
To Ward’s question, II., 85.—How we ‘‘ know 
that the whole sidereal system will not turn out 
more like the bird than the stone; an organized 
whole manifesting life and self-direction?”’ 
he answers that he does not know anything of 
the sort. If Jupiter should break away from his 
[N. S. Von. X. No. 249. 
orbit, and set the whole system in commotion, 
the true naturalist would assert, not with regret 
or disappointment, but with hearty satisfaction, 
that he knows more about celestial mechanics 
than he did before, and that he will now, if he 
has opportunity, study Jupiter’s motives and 
his cerebral pathology, and try to find out what 
to expect from a planet so erratic. Itis not he, 
but the philosophers, who teach that events 
which are mechanical are predetermined, al- 
though he does assert that he fails to see what 
good can come from an attempt to find out 
Jupiter’s motives until he does begin to break 
things and to behave in a way which astrono- 
mers had no reason to expect. 
Ward tells, II., 48.—that as the naturalists 
conceive the world as a whole ‘it seems com- 
parable to nothing so much as an upturned 
hour glass. The glass could not start itself; 
this, at least, was an interference from without, 
but it was an interference before the process, 
not during it. Science, which is confined to 
describing the movements of the sand, can 
give no account of this catastrophe, and no 
meaning to it. But once the glass is turned the 
downward dance of the last grain to move is 
just as inevitable as that of the first; and the 
several movements being fixed, any collateral 
consequences of them must be taken as fixed, 
too.’’ 
The naturalist does not know that the ‘ down- 
ward dance’ of the first grain to move is inevi- 
table. He asserts that he has good reason to 
expect and no reason to doubt that the sand 
willrun. Ifit should do anything else, in the 
absence of an obstruction, he would know more 
than he does now, and he would try to find 
out why his expectations have disappointed 
him. 
He asserts, furthermore, that he may find 
meaning in the turning of the glass, provided 
he knows what Ward himself calls the ‘initial 
conditions’; that he has good reason to believe 
that some one turned it because he chose. 
He also has good reason to believe that, if he 
had known these initial conditions, the desire 
to turn the glass, and the turning of the glass, 
would be neither less nor more than he might 
have expected. . 
The interminable controversy about deter- 
