Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/63

Rh The law, such, as ill-informed science would have stated it, and which would have affirmed that this antecedent always produces this consequent, without taking account of the accessory circumstances, this law, which was only approximate and probable, must be replaced by another law more approximate and more probable, which brings in these accessory circumstances. We always come back, therefore, to that same process which we have analyzed above, and if humanity should discover something of this sort, it would not say that it is the laws which have evoluted, but the circumstances which have changed.

Here, therefore, are several different senses of the word contingence. M. LeRoy retains them all and he does not sufficiently distinguish them, but he introduces a new one. Experimental laws are only approximate, and if some appear to us as exact, it is because we have artificially transformed them into what I have above called a principle. We have made this transformation freely, and as the caprice which has determined us to make it is something eminently contingent, we have communicated this contingence to the law itself. It is in this sense that we have the right to say that determinism supposes freedom, since it is freely that we become determinists. Perhaps it will be found that this is to give large scope to nominalism and that the introduction of this new sense of the word contingence will not help much to solve all those questions which naturally arise and of which we have just been speaking.

I do not at all wish to investigate here the foundations of the principle of induction; I know very well that I shall not succeed; it is as difficult to justify this principle as to get on without it. I only wish to show how scientists apply it and are forced to apply it.

When the same antecedent recurs, the same consequent must likewise recur; such is the ordinary statement. But reduced to these terms this principle could be of no use. For one to be able to say that the same antecedent recurred, it would be necessary for the circumstances all to be reproduced, since no one is absolutely indifferent, and for them to be exactly reproduced. And, as that will never happen, the principle can have no application.

We should therefore modify the enunciation and say: If an antecedent A has once produced a consequent B, an antecedent A′, slightly different from A, will produce a consequent B′, slightly different from B. But how shall we recognize that the antecedents A and A' are "slightly different"? If some one of the circumstances can be expressed by a number, and this number has in the two cases values very near together, the sense of the phrase "slightly different" is relatively clear; the principle then signifies that the consequent is a continuous function of the antecedent. And as a practical rule, we reach this conclusion that we have the right to interpolate. This