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 THE DEFINITION OF NATUBAL LAW. 5(57 past and an unknowable future. Such an attempt is really fore- doomed to failure, and gives ample opportunities for the enemy to blaspheme. But once get rid of the qualification " observed " from the definition of Natural Law, and Science is placed at once in a sounder and more tenable position. Moreover the ascertainment-clause is open to another objection. It is clear that our possibilities of observation are restricted not only by the limits which time imposes, but by the imperfection of our faculties. The moment we get beyond the commonest pheno- mena of every-day life, we can rarely be quite sure that a suffi- cient number of instances have been observed to justify a universal induction. But over and above this we have to take into account our possibilities of error in the process of observation. Such errors cannot be entirely excluded even from, the laboratory, and, in cases in which experimental tests are impossible and we are confronted with the phenomena which uncontrolled nature pre- sents to us, it is obvious that the possibilities of error are im- mensely increased. This is particularly true in the relations of body and mind. The antecedents ABC may be followed a million times within our experience by DEF as consequents. But on some occasion X is added, unknown to us, to the antecedents, and we are startled by the appearance of an unfamiliar Z in the consequents. There are two solutions in which our perplexity usually takes refuge, the one being that Z is a subjective illusion, the other that it is a mystery which smacks of the miraculous. Both, of course, are equally untrue, and both alike spring from a form of intellectual bondage. The man who is slave to a limited conception of Natural Law dismisses the difficulty by declaring the new appearance an illusion. The man who is slave to superstition, religious or otherwise, calls it a mystery, a supernatural something, whose coming and going is wholly independent of the orderly course of nature, and conse- quently an indirect proof of the particular form of superstition which he happens to revere. And yet all the time it is a perfectly orderly phenomenon, the product (if I may so call it at the ex- pense of strict accuracy) of Natural though unobserved Law. The correlations of body and mind are still most imperfectly understood, and till comparatively lately their existence was hardly known. Before it was understood that body and mind cohere, not as independent elements of a temporary combination, but as mutually dependent members of an organic whole, a large class of rare bodily phenomena were not unnaturally regarded by many as miraculous or supernatural. Stigmatisation, healing by faith, many of the phenomena of trance, mesmerism, clairvoyance, &c., formerly admitted of no other explanation. But now that we know the power of imagination and its related faculties to produce physical pain or even injury ; when we find that gout may be cured by a sudden fit of emotion, warts charmed away by counting or being treated with coloured water, and a variety of