thout the conception of law and
order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it.
That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a
connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are
self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion
of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must
eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science
perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the
history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords
the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of
a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to
hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in
fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently
assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical
shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear
that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of
myth-making and fetish worship--the homage to the fetish of law. Even
the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,'
says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we
do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no
causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If
we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of
rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and
independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such
language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak
of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive
does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as
the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the
movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the
planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that
this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of
speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a
smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which
it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and
self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and
lords many, so amenable to concrete pr