5. The existence of Laws in the Spiritual world other than the Natural
Laws (1) improbable, (2) unnecessary, (3) unknown. Qualification.
6. The Spiritual not the projection upward of the Natural; but the
Natural the projection downward of the Spiritual.
INTRODUCTION.
"This method turns aside from hypotheses not to be tested by any
known logical canon familiar to science, whether the hypothesis
claims support from intuition, aspiration or general plausibility.
And, again, this method turns aside from ideal standards which avow
themselves to be lawless, which profess to transcend the field of
law. We say, life and conduct shall stand for us wholly on a basis
of law, and must rest entirely in that region of science (not
physical, but moral and social science), where we are free to use
our intelligence in the methods known to us as intelligible logic,
methods which the intellect can analyze. When you confront us with
hypotheses, however sublime and however affecting, if they cannot be
stated in terms of the rest of our knowledge, if they are disparate
to that world of sequence and sensation which to us is the ultimate
base of all our real knowledge, then we shake our heads and turn
aside."--_Frederick Harrison._
"Ethical science is already forever completed, so far as her general
outline and main principles are concerned, and has been, as it were,
waiting for physical science to come up with her."--_Paradoxical
Philosophy._
PART I.
Natural Law is a new word. It is the last and the most magnificent
discovery of science. No more telling proof is open to the modern world
of the greatness of the idea than the greatness of the attempts which
have always been made to justify it. In the earlier centuries, before
the birth of science, Phenomena were studied alone. The world then was a
chaos, a collection of single, isolated, and independent facts. Deeper
thinkers saw, indeed, that relations must subsist between these facts,
but the Reign of Law was never more to the ancients than a far-off
vision. Their philosophies, conspicuously those of the Stoics and
Pythagoreans, heroically sought to marshal the discrete materials of the
universe into thinkable form, but from these artificial and fantastic
systems nothing remains to us now but an ancient testimony to the
grandeur of that harmony which they failed to reach.
With Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler the first regular lines of the
universe began to be discerned. When Nature yielded to Newton her great
secret, Gravitation was felt to be not greater as a fact in itself than
as a revelation that Law was fact. And thenceforth the search for
individual Phenomena gave way before the larger study of their
relations. The pursuit of Law became the passion of science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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