Newton assuredly lent no shadow of support to the modern pseudo-scientific philosophy which confounds laws with causes. I have not taken the trouble to trace out this commonest of fallacies to its first beginning; but I was familiar with it in full bloom, more than forty years ago, in a work which had a great vogue in its day—the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation"—of which the first edition was published in 1844.
It is full of apt and forcible illustrations of pseudo-scientific realism. Consider, for example, this gem serene: When a boy who has climbed a tree looses his hold of the branch, "the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and then he is hurt," whereby the Almighty is quite relieved from any responsibility for the accident. Here is the "law of gravitation" acting as a cause, in a way quite in accordance with the Duke of Argyll's conception of it. In fact, in the mind of the author of the "Vestiges," "laws" are existences intermediate between the Creator and his works, like the "ideas" of the Platonizers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.[1] I may cite a passage which is quite in the vein of Philo:
And creation "operating by law" is constantly cited as relieving the Creator from trouble about insignificant details.
I am perplexed to picture to myself the state of mind which accepts these verbal juggleries. It is intelligible that the Creator should operate according to such rules as he might think fit to lay down 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 these more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the
- ↑ The author recognizes this in his "Explanations."
