11.]

THE UNIVERSALITY OF LAW.

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that the sovereignty of the individual over his own mind and body is not absolute. I say that positive Liberty, real Liberty, does not reside in lawlessness that law is not its opposite, but its essential condition. And I say that this is universally true -true in the political order, true in the ethical order, true in the physical order. "Nothing is that errs from law." Everywhere, to ascertain and to obey the law is the one way to Liberty. Let us consider it a little in detail.

And first take the domain of the physical sciences. The very word science implies law. If the universe were the realm of chance, science could not exist. Banish from it law, and you have "chaos come again." What is the astronomical world but an expression of the laws of gravitation? What the vegetable world but an expression of the laws of growth? What the organic world but an expression of the laws of life? What is the eye but an expression of the laws of optics? or the lung but an expression of the laws of respiration? or the car but an expression of the laws of acoustics? The deeper our insight into nature, the profounder is our apprehension of the great truth that law reigns throughout the universe, dominating the organic and the inorganic, the smallest things and the greatest, the most complex and the simplest, the seemingly most mutable and capricious and the

apparently most fixed and stable; penetrating all spheres of knowledge, all realms of existence, all time, and all space. The great achievement of physicists, in these latter days, has been to demonstrate the continuity of natural law. Even at the risk of putting before my readers what is already familiar to them, let me give one instance of what I am saying, from an admirable little book of Sir John Herschel's, which, I remember, greatly fascinated me as a schoolboy. He is speaking of the planetary inequalities known to physical astronomy by the name of "perturbations." When Newton first reasoned his way from the broad features of the celestial motions up to the law of universal gravitation, as affecting all matter and as rendering every particle in the universe subject to the influence of every other, it was impossible for him, owing to the undeveloped state of the science, to extend his investigations to the mutual perturbations of the planets. But, as Sir John Herschel tells us, "What Newton left undone, his successors have accomplished; and, at this day, there is not a single perturbation, great or small, which observation has ever detected, which has not been traced up to its origin in the mutual gravitation of the parts of our system, and been minutely accounted for, in its amount and value, by strict calculation on Newton's principles." Now, that process which we call the law of gravitation may stand for a

11.]

WHAT ARE LAWS OF NATURE?

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type of the laws of nature in general. These laws are facts everywhere true within the limits of physical science. Consider the great law of attraction. The mean distance of the planet Jupiter from the earth is about 380,000,000 miles, yet our planet feels its influence, and is caused thereby to deviate from her appointed way round the sun. Again, an electric explosion in the sun makes a magnet on the earth shudder and tremble. It is not too much to say that one result of the vast progress of the physical sciences in these latter times has been to exhibit the illimitable world as closely bound together. The universal solidarity of things, the coherence of all reality, is the great lesson of the nineteenth century. Think of the enormous consequences of that one discoverydue to an admirable analysis of the solar lightthat the elements which compose the earth enter also into the composition of the sun. It is a link between geology and astronomy. In the face of that revelation can we doubt the internal connection of light, electricity, gravitation, and motion? Nay, can we doubt that a key will, sooner or later, be found to the law of universal unity whereunto our reason reaches forward by virtue of its essence?

And here let me note the misconception, so prevalent in these days of loose thinking and of looser writing, as to those laws of nature of which we have been speaking. The proper meaning of law

is "that which necessarily is." In physical science, necessity has no place. The only sense in which mere physicists have any right whatever to speak of laws, is the sense of ascertained sequences or coordinations of phenomena. I freely grant, or rather I strenuously maintain, that the laws of nature are much more than that. But if we wish to know what more they are, we must turn aside from the physicist. For an explanation of their real significance if explanation there be-we must consult the philosopher, the metaphysician. "The order of nature," St. Augustine tells us, "is the will of God"-"Dei voluntas est rerum natura." The word "cosmos is excellently explained by Rothe as "die als zweckvoll gedachte universitas rerum "the universe considered as full of purpose. It is an immense variety of causes and forces, issuing from the Infinite and Eternal and tending to return to him by virtue of the supreme law of finality. With which agrees the dictum of Leibnitz, that finality is the light and life of all science. The laws of nature and the laws of the human intellect are the expression of a general principle which is reason. And this age of ours, when astronomy exhibits the majestic harmony of the measureless universe, when geology reveals the astounding metamorphoses through which our earth has passed, when paleontology lifts the veil from the vast series of changes that have raised our race from its prehistoric beginnings to its present height of civilization, when, in a word, all sciences tell the same

II.] "NATURA NON NISI PARENDO VINCITUR." 57

tale of progressive evolution-surely this is not the age in which materialism should quench the light that illumines the wondrous all and that gives us its only rational explanation.

Nobler was the conception of the Hebrew poet, who, in the childhood of the world, revealed the Divine Concept to his countrymen as Yahveh-" He who makes to be." The laws of nature are necessary, necessitate consequenti. They proceed from the necessary Being. They are what they are, because He is what He is. "He discreetly veils Himself," sings Schiller, "in eternal laws"-"Bescheiden verhüllt er sich in ewigen Gesetzen." Veils Himself, and yet manifests Himself. For those laws are expressions of Supreme Reason; they are emanations from Him who is the Truth, of whom all truth is part. Therefore they are, in the strictest sense, divine. And precisely because they are divine do they rule us. By learning them, and by conforming himself to them, a man emancipates himself from physical fatality and "breaks his birth's invidious bar." And so Lord Bacon's dictum, "Natura, non nisi parendo, vincitur." In the domain of the natural sciences there is no Liberty for man save in obedience to their laws, eternally true and abiding for ever. Here, assuredly, it holds good that "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Unquestionably, then, in the physical order,