Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/833

Rh promise the profoundest tendency to revolt against the law of uniform succession as too dull to he credible, and to exult in the occasional evidence which the history of their time affords that "truth after all is stranger than fiction." Is not the early love of tales of marvel, and the later love of tales of wild adventure and hair-breadth escapes, and again, the deep pleasure which we all feel in that "poetic justice" which is so rare in actual experience, a sufficient proof that men retain, even to the last, a keen prepossession against the doctrine that laws of uniform antecedency and consequence can be traced throughout the most interesting phases of human life? Even in the city, where so many hopes are crushed every day, the "Bull" goes on believing in his own too sanguine expectations, and the "Bear" in his own dismal predictions, without correcting his own bias as experience should have led him to correct it. I believe it will be found that nothing is more difficult than to beat into the majority of minds the belief that there is such a thing as a "law of Nature" at all. So far as I can judge, nine women out of ten have never adequately realized what a law of Nature means, nor is the proportion much smaller for men, unless they have been well drilled in some department of physics. Of course, I heartily agree with Dr. Ward that experience can not prove the uniformity of Nature, and for this very good reason, among others, that it is impossible to say what the uniformity of Nature means. We can not exhaust the number of interfering causes which may break that uniformity. I at least can not doubt that, so far as mind influences matter, there may be a vast multitude of real disturbing causes introduced by mind to break through those laws of uniformity in material things, of which at present we know only the elements. But of this I am very sure, that at present we are much apter to accept superficial and inadequate evidence of the breach of laws of uniformity than we ought to be; that education does not do half enough to beat out of our minds that credulous expectation that there is some disposition in the governing principles of the universe, either to favor us or to persecute us, as the case may be, which springs, not from experience, but from groundless prejudice and prepossession; and that much greater efforts should be made to set before young people the true inexorability of Nature's laws than is actually made at present. It is quite true that no man can say positively either that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that an iron bar will fall to the ground if the hand drops it. We do not absolutely know that the sun may not blaze up and go out before to-morrow, as it is said that some stars of considerable magnitude have blazed up and gone out. We do not know that there may not be some enormously powerful and invisible magnet in the neighborhood which will attract the iron bar upward with more force than that with which the earth pulls it downward. But we do know that in millions and billions of cases expectations founded on the same sort of evidence as the expectation that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the dropped