think he has proved its object to be of human origin. He goes to no end of trouble to prove in various ways, what his opponent would have granted with the utmost cheerfulness at the outset, that laws of nature are rational; and, having got so far, he seems to think nothing more is requisite than to seize a logical maxim as a leaping pole and lightly skip to the conclusion that the laws of nature are of human provenance. If he had thoroughly accepted the truth that all realities, as well as all figments, are alike of purely mental composition, he would have seen that the question was, not whether natural law is of an intellectual nature or not, but whether it is of the number of those intellectual objects that are destined ultimately to be exploded from the spectacle of our universe, or whether, as far as we can judge, it has the stuff to stand its ground in spite of all attacks. In other words, is there anything that is really and truly a law of nature, or are all pretended laws of nature figments, in which latter case, all natural science is a delusion, and the writing of a grammar of science a very idle pastime?
Professor Pearson's theory of natural law is characterized by a singu- lar vagueness and by a defect so glaring as to remind one of the second book of the Novum Organum or of some strong chess-player whose at- tention has been so riveted upon a part of the board that a fatal danger has, as it were, been held upon the blind-spot of his mental retina. The manner in which the current of thought passes from the woods into the open plain and back again into the woods, over and over again, betrays the amount of labor that has been expended upon the chapter. The author calls attention to the sifting action both of our perceptive and of our reflective faculties. I think that I myself extracted from that vein of thought pretty much all that is valuable in reference to the regu- larity of nature in the Popular Science Monthly for June, 1878, (p. 208). I there remarked that the degree to which nature seems to present a general regularity depends upon the fact that the regularities in it are of interest and importance to us, while the irregularities are without practical use or significance; and in the same article I en- deavored to show that it is impossible to conceive of nature's being markedly less regular, taking it, *by and large,' than it actually is. But I am confident, from having repeatedly returned to that line of thought that it is impossible legitimately to deduce from any such con- siderations the unreality of natural law. 'As a pure suggestion and noth- ing more,' toward the end of the chapter, after his whole plea has been put in, Dr. Pearson brings forward the idea that a transcendental opera- tion of the perceptive faculty may reject a mass of sensation altogether and arrange the rest in place and time, and that to this the laws in na- ture may be attributable—a notion to which Kant undoubtedly leaned at one time. The mere emission of such a theory, after his argument has been fully set forth, almost amounts to a confession of failure to
