Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/60

54 Take the law of gravitation, which is the least imperfect of all known laws. It enables us to foresee the motions of the planets. When I use it, for instance, to calculate the orbit of Saturn, I neglect the action of the stars, and in doing so, I am certain of not deceiving myself, because I know that these stars are too far away for their action to be sensible.

I announce, then, with a quasi-certitude that the coordinates of Saturn at such an hour will be comprised between such and such limits. Yet is that certitude absolute? Could there not exist in the universe some gigantic mass, much greater than that of all the known stars and whose action could make itself felt at great distances? That mass might be animated by a colossal velocity, and after having circulated from all time at such distances that its influence had remained hitherto insensible to us, it might come all at once to pass near us. Surely it would produce in our solar system enormous perturbations that we could not have foreseen. All that can be said is that such an event is wholly improbable, and then, instead of saying: Saturn will be near such a point of the heavens, we must limit ourselves to saying: Saturn will probably be near such a point of the heavens. Although this probability may be practically equivalent to certainty, it is only a probability.

For all these reasons, no particular law will ever be more than approximate and probable. Scientists have never failed to recognize this truth; only they believe, right or wrong, that every law may be replaced by another closer and more probable, that this new law will itself be only provisional, but that the same movement can continue indefinitely, so that science in progressing will possess laws more and more probable, that the approximation will end by differing as little as you choose from exactitude and the probability from certitude.

If the scientists who think thus were right, must it still be said that the laws of nature are contingent, even though each law, taken in particular, may be qualified as contingent? Or must one require, before concluding the contingence of the natural laws, that this progress have an end, that the scientist finish some day by being arrested in his search for a closer and closer approximation and that, beyond a certain limit, he thereafter meet in nature only caprice?

In the conception of which I have just spoken (and which I shall call the scientific conception), every law is only a statement, imperfect and provisional, but it must one day be replaced by another, a superior law, of which it is only a crude image. No place therefore remains for the intervention of a free will.

It seems to me that the kinetic theory of gases will furnish us a striking example.

You know that in this theory all the properties of gases are