NATUKAL LAW AND MIRACLE. 



49 



Stromungen der Gcgemrart (1904), " So does the remarkable 

 cult of natural law pass from Giordano Bruno through the 

 new era to the present time. The more sceptical men are 

 to-day about religion, the more do they make a fetish of Natural 

 Law. The more audaciously the declaration of a law and 

 canon is pressed, the more easily does it find acceptance. We 

 are accustomed to look at a fact before we recognize its truth. 

 But to doubt a law seems to be a sin against the spirit of 

 science." 



Now how is it really that our opponents have come to lean 

 on this dogma of the " absolutely unalterable Laws of Nature " ?' 

 The answer is simple enough. Our opponents have observed 

 that the occurrences in Nature arrange themselves according to 

 certain rules in Nature and recur in regular sequence. From 

 this most correct observation they draw the false conclusion 

 that these rules in the world of Nature are absolutely 

 "unalterable." The regularity with which natural phenomena 

 recur produces in our opponents, simply as a m.atter of liabit, 

 the expectation that that which has always till now been, must 

 repeat itself again to-morrow. 



Look at the following case : a child of five years is left alone 

 on an island, having never heard of the possibility of the 

 death of a human being. There he grows to be an old man of 

 seventy. Could this old man, on the ground of the fact that 

 he had consciously lived sixty-five years on the island, be sure 

 that he would live to be seventy-one ? There is no necessity 

 for the fulfilment of his expectation. He might pass away the 

 following day. Experience alone would inform him. 



But the fallacy of our opponents is, scientifically considered, 

 more short-sighted than the wild imagination of the old man. 

 Our opponents forget that to scientific observation only an 

 almost infinitesimal fraction of the universe is accessible. And 

 their observation is still further limited to a trifiing period 

 of time as compared with the time in which the universe has 

 existed. 



The advance of the dogma of the absolute unalterability of 

 the Laws of Nature as known to us is thoughtlessly premature. 

 It is an expression implying satiety of knowledge and a 

 circumscribed dogmatism. 



We can therefore only ask our opponents to lay to heart the 

 true utterance of Sigwart, the well-known logician, when he 

 says in his Logik (1893) : 



"It is but an empty, rhetorical phrase so to speak of the Laws of 

 Nature as if the formulary itself operated with magic power on 



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