922 



SCIENCE. 



[N.S. Vol. XV. No. 389. 



The assumption that there axe such things 

 is due to him, and such ' laws ' are known 

 only through his mind, in which alone na- 

 ture is seen. 



It is perhaps a hard saying to most 

 that there are no such things as 'laws of 

 nature ' ; but this is the theme on which I 

 have to speak. 



These, then, are the laws of man's own 

 mind, or the effects of his own mind, which 

 he projects outside of himself and imagines 

 to be due to some permanent and un- 

 alterable cause having an independent 

 existence. This is not only because his 

 season for observation is but a moment in 

 the passage of nature's eternal year, and 

 because with his pathetic sense of his own 

 weakness he would gladly stay himself on 

 the word of some unchanging being. It is 

 because this sense of dependence is 

 strangely joined with such self-conceit that 

 when he listens to what he himself says 

 he calls it the voice of God. Prom 

 these twin causes, arising both from his 

 inability as a creature of time to observe 

 nature, which is eternal, and again from his 

 own overweening sense of his own 

 capacity to know her, he looks for some 

 immutable being whom he believes to have 

 written his own ideas in what he calls 'the 

 book of nature.' 



I am not questioning the existence of 

 such a being as the 'Author of Nature'; 

 but asking if such a volume as is imputed 

 to him, ever really existed. The very 

 phrase, ' book of nature, ' is a legacy from 

 moribund medieval notions of a lawgiver; 

 and it, with the vitality of words which 

 carry to us djdng ideas, has lived on to our 

 own time, when we can no longer believe 

 it in our hearts, although it is still upon our 

 lips. 



To convince ourselves, we need only 

 pause a moment to ask the simple question 

 whether there is any authority who has pre- 

 pared such a clearly written book of 



statutes in which we can really read 

 nature's laws. 



The question answers itself. 



I repeat that I am not denying here the 

 existence of such a being as the imputed 

 author of these laws, but say that, ignorant 

 as we are of what is being done by him, 

 we cannot read his thoughts in our momen- 

 tary vision of what is forever passing. 



'For my thoughts are not your 

 thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, 

 saith the Lord ' is a caution which, whether 

 believers or not, it would not harm us to 

 consider; and when we say that these 

 'thoughts' are written in 'the book of na- 

 ture,' this cannot mean that they are 

 legible there as in a statute book where he 

 who runs may read. If nature is to be 

 compared to a book at all, it is to a book 

 in the hands of an infant to whom it con- 

 veys little meaning, for such are we; or 

 rather it is like a 'book of celestial hiero- 

 glyphs, of which even prophets are happy 

 that they can read here a line and there a 

 line. ' 



I hope what I am trying to say may not 

 bear the appearance of some metaphysical 

 refinement on common sense. It is com- 

 mon sense that is intended, and the 'laws 

 of nature ' that seem to me a metaphysical 

 phrase. 



To decorate our own guesses at nature's 

 meaning with the name 'laws of nature' 

 is a presumption due to our own feeble 

 human nature, which we can forgive 

 for demanding something more permanent 

 than itself, but which also leads us to have 

 such an exalted conceit of our own opinions 

 as to hide from ourselves that it is these 

 very opinions which Ave call nature's laws. 



The history of the past shows that once 

 most philosophers, even atheists, thus re- 

 garded the ' Laws of Nature, ' not as their 

 own interpretations of her, but as some- 

 thing external to themselves, as entities 

 partaking the attributes of Deity— entities 



