There is a law of nature, so well vouched by experience, that all mankind, from pure logicians in search of examples to parish sextons in search of fees, confide in it. This is the law that "all men are mortal." It is simply a statement of the observed order of facts that all men sooner or later die. I am not acquainted with any law of nature which is more "constant and uniform" than this. But will any one tell me that death is "necessary"? Certainly there is no _à priori_ necessity in the case, for various men have been imagined to be immortal. And I should be glad to be informed of any "necessity" that can be deduced from biological considerations. It is quite conceivable, as has recently been pointed out, that some of the lowest forms of life may be immortal, after a fashion. However this may be, I would further ask, supposing "all men are mortal" to be a real law of nature, where and what is that to which, with any propriety, the title of "compelling force" of the law can be given? On page 69, the Duke of Argyll asserts that the law of gravitation "is a law in the sense, not merely of a rule, but of a cause." But this revival of the teaching of the _Vestiges_ has already been examined {287} and disposed of; and when the Duke of Argyll states that the "observed order" which Kepler had discovered was simply a necessary consequence of the force of "gravitation," I need not recapitulate the evidence which proves such a statement to be wholly fallacious. But it may be useful to say, once more, that, at this present moment, nobody knows anything about the existence of a "force" of gravitation apart from the fact; that Newton declared the ordinary notion of such force to be inconceivable; that various attempts have been made to account for the order of facts we call gravitation, without recourse to the notion of attractive force; that, if such a force exists, it is utterly incompetent to account for Kepler's laws, without taking into the reckoning a great number of other considerations; and, finally, that all we know about the "force" of gravitation, or any other so-called "force," is that it is a name for the hypothetical cause of an observed order of facts. Thus, when the Duke of Argyll says: "Force, ascertained according to some measure of its operation--this is indeed one of the definitions, but only one, of a scientific law" (p. 71), I reply that it is a definition which must be repudiated by every one who possesses an adequate acquaintance with either the facts, or the philosophy, of science and relegated to the limbo of pseudo-scientific fallacies. If the human mind had never entertained this notion of "force," nay, if it substituted bare invariable succession for the ordinary notion of causation, the idea of law, as the expression of a constantly-observed order, which {288} generates a corresponding intensity of expectation in our minds, would have exactly the same value, and play its part in real science, exactly as it does now.