Page:Chance, love, and logic - philosophical essays (IA chancelovelogicp00peir 0).pdf/20

 of the various laws of nature is obtained, he could not admit that experience could prove their claim to absoluteness. All the physical laws actually known, like Boyle's law or the law of gravitation, involve excessive simplification of the phenomenal course of events, and thus a large element of empirical inaccuracy. But a more positive objection against the traditional assumption of absolute or invariable laws of nature, is the fact that such assumption makes the regularities of the universe ultimate, and thus cuts us off from the possibility of ever explaining them or how there comes to be as much regularity in the universe as there is. But in ordinary affairs, the occurrence of any regularity is the very thing to be explained. Moreover, modern statistical mechanics and thermodynamics (theory of gases, entropy, etc.) suggest that the regularity in the universe is a matter of gradual growth; that the whole of physical nature is a growth from a chaos of diversity to a maximum of uniformity or entropy. A leading physicist of the 19th Century, Boltzmann, has suggested that the process of the whole physical universe is like that of a continuous shaking up of a hap-hazard or chance mixture of things, which thus gradually results in a progressively more uniform distribution. Since Duns Scotus, students of logic have known that every real entity has its individual character (its haecceitas or thisness) which cannot be explained or deduced from that which is uniform. Every explanation, for example, of the moon's path must take particular existences for granted. Such original or underived individuality and diversity is precisely what Peirce means by chance; and from this point of view chance is prior to law.