Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/103

 90 C. L. MORGAN : await human discovery. This view is perhaps the prevalent view, And yet I venture to think that it is an erroneous view a remnant of what a Comtist would term the metaphysical stage of knowledge and one that is strangely out of place in these more positive times. First, I would ask in what sense it can be true that these laws have existed from the time when the operations of nature began? Take for example the law of gravitation. Can we say that this law has been in existence since the operations of nature began ? I think not. The law is a generalisation, and generalisation implies a generaliser. So, far from having been in existence since the operations of nature began, it had, I contend, no existence before it was formulated by man. The phenomena from which such a law might be educed have been in existence for ages, uncounted ; but until man, the educer, appeared, the educed law could have no existence. The laws of nature, or, as I should prefer to call them, the laws of science, are human products, the^ result of observation and of inference based thereon. In opposition to this view it may perhaps be urged that (to take a wider generalisation than even the law of gravitation) the opera- tions of nature were uniform before man discovered their uni- formity. Undoubtedly this is so. But the uniformity of pheno- mena and the law which summarises the fact are not one and the same thing. On this head, indeed, it would seem that both schools are agreed. But whereas the one school maintains that the natural law was there from the beginning, exercising what Mr. Pearson terms "absolute jurisdiction" over the facts, the other school believes with Lewes, that " what we call laws of nature are not objective existences, but subjective abstractions formulae in which the multitudinous phenomena are stripped of their variety and reduced to unity ". Again it may be urged that the law was implicit in the pheno- mena before man came to formulate it as such. Well, I am not quite sure that I know what implicit in the phenomena, means. Does it mean that the law was actually existent as such? or does it mean that the facts were such that this generalisation could be extracted from them ? In the former casa I beg to be informed Iww actually existent. Mr. Pearson is care- ful to remind us that " Natural Law in the scientific sense involves no notion of an over-ruling ordinance ". I would fain know the mode of existence of an unknown natural law and the manner in which it exercises its ''absolute jurisdiction ". But if the law was only implicit in the phenomena in the sense that when man appeared on the earth this generalisation could be extracted from them, then, as it seems to me, the law is only implicit in pheno- mena in the same sense and . to the same degree that a half sovereign is implicit in the gold-bearing quartz-reef. The raw material was undoubtedly there. But on the strength of this to proclaim that the half sovereign was in existence countless ages: