my own studies in logic lead me to call in question such negative inferences. Laws of nature are uniformities observed to exist in the action of certain material agents, but it is logically impossible to show that all other agents must behave as these do. The too exclusive study of particular branches of physical science seems to generate an over-confident and dogmatic spirit. Rejoicing in the success with which a few groups of facts are brought beneath the apparent sway of laws, the investigator hastily assumes that he is close upon the ultimate springs of being. A particle of gelatinous matter is found to obey the ordinary laws of chemistry; yet it moves and lives. The world is therefore asked to believe that chemistry can resolve the mysteries of existence.
The Meaning of Natural Law.
Pindar speaks of Law as the Ruler of the Mortals and the Immortals, and it seems to be commonly supposed that the so-called Laws of Nature, in like manner, rule man and his Creator. The course of nature is regarded as being determined by invariable principles of mechanics which have acted since the world began, and will act for evermore. Even if the origin of all things is attributed to an intelligent creative mind, that Being is regarded as having yielded up arbitrary power, and as being subject like a human legislator to the laws which he has himself enacted. Such notions I should describe as superficial and erroneous, being derived, as I think, from false views of the nature of scientific inference, and the degree of certainty of the knowledge which we acquire by inductive investigation.
A law of nature, as I regard the meaning of the expression, is not a uniformity which must be obeyed by all objects, but merely a uniformity which is as a matter of fact obeyed by those objects which have come beneath our observation. There is nothing whatever incompatible with logic in the discovery of objects which should prove exceptions to any law of nature. Perhaps the best established law is that which asserts an invariable correlation to exist between gravity and inertia, so that all gravitating bodies are found to possess inertia, and all bodies possessing inertia are found to gravitate. But it would be no reproach to our scientific method, if something were ultimately discovered to possess gravity without inertia. Strictly defined and correctly interpreted, the law itself would acknowledge the possibility; for with the statement of every law we ought properly to join an estimate of the number of instances in which it has been observed to hold true, and the probability thence calculated, that it will hold true in the next case. Now, as we found (p. 259), no finite number of instances can warrant us in expecting with certainty that the next instance will be of like nature; in the formulas yielded by the inverse method of probabilities a unit always appears to represent the probability that our inference will be mistaken. I demur to the assumption that there is any necessary truth even in such fundamental laws of nature as the Indestructibility of Matter, the Conservation of Energy, or the Laws of Motion. Certain it is that men of science have recognised the conceivability of other laws, and even investigated their mathematical consequences. Airy investigated the mathematical conditions of a perpetual motion (p. 223), and Laplace and Newton discussed imaginary laws of forces inconsistent with those observed to operate in the universe (pp. 642, 706).
The laws of nature, as I venture to regard them, are simply general propositions concerning the correlation of properties which have been observed to hold true of bodies hitherto observed. On the assumption that our experience is of adequate extent, and that no arbitrary interference takes place, we are then able to assign the probability, always less than certainty, that the next object of the same apparent nature will conform to the same laws.