n for
himself (and therefore according to law); but that would leave the
operation of his will just as much a direct personal act as it would
be under any other circumstances. I can also understand that (as in
Leibnitz's caricature of Newton's views) the Creator might have made
the cosmical machine, and, after setting it going, have left it to
itself till it needed repair. But then, by the supposition, his
personal responsibility would have been involved in all that it did;
just as much as a dynamiter is responsible for what happens, when he
has set his machine going and left it to explode.

The only hypothesis which gives a sort of mad consistency to the
Vestigiarian's views is the supposition that laws are a kind of angels
or demiurgoi, who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan,
were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this
doctrine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those
more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the little
ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the
paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the
preacher's discourse must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be
attributed to the author of the "Vestiges."

But the author of the "Vestiges" is not the only writer who is
responsible for the current pseudo-scientific mystifications which
hang about the term "law." When I wrote my paper about "Scientific and
Pseudo-Scientific Realism," I had not read a work by the Duke of
Argyll, "The Reign of Law," which, I believe, has enjoyed, possibly
still enjoys, a widespread popularity. But the vivacity of the Duke's
attack led me to think it possible that criticisms directed elsewhere
might have come home to him. And, in fact, I find that the second
chapter of the work in question, which is entitled "Law; its
definitions," is, from my point of view, a sort of "summa" of
pseudo-scientific philosophy. It will be worth while to examine it in
some detail.

In the first place, it is to be noted that the author of the "Reign of
Law" admits that "law," in many cases, means nothing more than the
statement of the order in which facts occur, or, as he says, "an
observed order of facts" (p. 66). But his appreciation of the value of
accuracy of expression does not hinder him from adding, almost in the
same breath, "In this sense the laws of nature are simply those facts
of nature which recur according to r