n individual. The universe would run deranged; the
world would be a mad world.

There used to be a children's book which bore the fascinating title of
"The Chance World." It described a world in which everything happened by
chance. The sun might rise or it might not; or it might appear at any
hour, or the moon might come up instead. When children were born they
might have one head or a dozen heads, and those heads might not be on
their shoulders--there might be no shoulders--but arranged about the
limbs. If one jumped up in the air it was impossible to predict whether
he would ever come down again. That he came down yesterday was no
guarantee that he would do it next time. For every day antecedent and
consequent varied, and gravitation and everything else changed from
hour to hour. To-day a child's body might be so light that it was
impossible for it to descend from its chair to the floor; but to-morrow,
in attempting the experiment again, the impetus might drive it through a
three-story house and dash it to pieces somewhere near the center of the
earth. In this chance world cause and effect were abolished. Law was
annihilated. And the result to the inhabitants of such a world could
only be that reason would be impossible. It would be a lunatic world
with a population of lunatics.

Now this is no more than a real picture of what the world would be
without Law, or the universe without Continuity. And hence we come in
sight of the necessity of some principle of Law according to which Laws
shall be, and be "continuous" throughout the system. Man as a rational
and moral being demands a pledge that if he depends on Nature for any
given result on the ground that Nature has previously led him to expect
such a result, his intellect shall not be insulted, nor his confidence
in her abused. If he is to trust Nature, in short, it must be guaranteed
to him that in doing so he will "never be put to confusion." The authors
of the _Unseen Universe_ conclude their examination of this principle by
saying that "assuming the existence of a supreme Governor of the
universe, the Principle of Continuity may be said to be the definite
expression in words of our trust that He will not put us to permanent
intellectual confusion, and we can easily conceive similar expressions
of trust with reference to the other faculties of man."[22] Or, as it
has been well put elsewhere, Continuity is the expression of "the Divine
Veracity in Nature."[23] The