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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1089 



and women and children : these things may 

 suffice to remind us of the invariant forms 

 of reality found or invented by theology 

 in her age-long toil and passion to conquer 

 the mutations of time by means of things 

 eternal. 



But theology's record is only an immense 

 chapter of the vastly more inclusive an- 

 nals of world-wide philosophic speculation 

 running through the ages. If we turn to 

 philosophy understood in the larger sense, 

 if we ask what answers she has made in the 

 long course of time to the question of what 

 is eternal, so diverse and manifold are the 

 voices heard across the centuries, from the 

 East and from the West, that the com- 

 bined response must needs seem to an un- 

 accustomed ear like an infinite babel of 

 tongues: the Confucian Way of Heaven; 

 the mystic Tao, so much resembling fate, 

 of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu; Buddhism's 

 inexorable spiritual law of cause and ef- 

 fect and its everlasting extinction of indi- 

 viduality in Nirvana — the final blowing out 

 of consciousness and character alike; 

 Ahura Mazda, the holy One, of Zarathus- 

 tra ; Fate, especially in the Greek tragedies 

 and Greek religion — the chain of causes in 

 nature, "the compulsion in the way 

 things grow," a fine thread running 

 through the whole of existence and binding 

 even the gods; the cosmic matter, or to 

 aircLpov of Anaximander ; the cosmic order, 

 the rhythm of events, the logos or reason 

 or nous, of Heracleitus; the finite, space- 

 filling sphere, or One, of the deep Parme- 

 nides; the four material and two psychic, 

 six eternal, elements, of Empedocles; the 

 infinitude of everlasting mind-moved 

 simple substances of Anaxagoras; the in- 

 finite multitude and endless variety of in- 

 variant "seeds of things" of Leueippus, 

 Demoeritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, to- 

 gether with their doctrines of absolute void 

 and the conservations of mass and mo- 



tion and infinite room or space; Plato's 

 eternal world of pure ideas; the great Cos- 

 mic Tear of a thousand thinkers, rolling 

 in vast endlessly repeated cycles on the be- 

 ginningless, endless course of time from 

 eternity to eternity; the changeless 

 thought-forms of Zeno, Gorgias and Aris- 

 totle; Leibnitz's indestructible, preestab- 

 lished harmony ; Spinoza 's infinite unalter- 

 able substance; the Absolute of the Hegel- 

 ian school; and so on and on far beyond 

 the limits of practicable enumeration. 

 This somewhat random partial list of 

 things will serve to recall and to represent 

 the enormous motley crowd of answers 

 that the ages of philosophic speculation 

 have made to the supreme inquiry of the 

 human spirit: what is there that survives 

 the mutations of time, abiding unchanged 

 despite the whirling flux of life and the 

 world ? 



And now, in the interest of further rep- 

 resenting salient features in a large per- 

 spective view, let me next ask what contri- 

 bution to the solution of the great problem 

 has been made by jurisprudence. Juris- 

 prudence is no doubt at once a branch of 

 philosophy and a branch of science, but it 

 has an interest, a direction and a character 

 of its own. And for the sake of due em- 

 phasis it will be well worth while to re- 

 mind ourselves specifically of the half-for- 

 gotten fact that, in its quest for justice 

 and order among men, jurisprudence long 

 ago found an answer to our oft-stated 

 riddle of the world, an answer which, 

 though but a partial one, yet satisfied the 

 greatest thinkers for many centuries, and 

 which, owing to the inborn supemalizing 

 proclivity of the human mind, stiU exer- 

 cises sway over the thought of the great 

 majority of mankind. I allude to the con- 

 ception of jus naturale or lex naturce, the 

 doctrine that in the order of Nature there 

 somehow exists a perfect, invariant, uni- 



