Corresponding to the thinker's positive knowledge, to the specific law or order, which at one time or another he finds manifest in his world, there is the well-known, but often misunderstood, character of nature as a great mechanism, moving of course under the law. But corresponding to his only tentative acceptance, though always trustful use of what he knows, there is the much neglected character of nature as not an idle, unproductive mechanism, always doing exactly the same thing, but, if I may so speak, a moving, developing, ever-productive one, serving some end larger and deeper than the known law. Nature must indeed be a machine if the thinker's knowledge demands uniformity or law, but an instrument of something other than her mechanical self, in short, not a merely revolving, but an evolving, always productive machine, if the knowledge itself is never final. The material, mechanical character of nature, as I have said, is often misunderstood. The real meaning of it is lost, and with serious results. In the first [p.219] place, it is taken as if it involved a wholly external, physical nature, and in the second place it is taken as if it represented this nature only as moving through its changes _according to a certain law_ and as having in consequence nothing to do but keep up the dead, strictly "mechanical" existence of its law-fixed character and incidentally involve man in the tireless turning of its fatal wheels. But nothing could be more superficial, or even more needlessly superstitious, than this. Obvious facts are overlooked or, if seen, forgotten. The simplest demands of a truly scientific mind are slighted so inexcusably. Could any law of an alien, external nature ever be an actual or possible object of knowledge? And could such law as is known --of a nature not alien--ever have any but a relative value, a provisional mediate character? Nature may be a machine, but the law of her moving is never identical with any law in positive knowledge, though what is known is always informed with the law of her moving; and this is to make her more than a mere machine. Again, no known law is ever _the_ law, and under _the_ law nature must be qualitatively different from what under the known law she appears to be. To neglect this difference, then, is seriously to misunderstand the mechanical character of nature.