fect, to the generality
expressive of the vital order) that the generality of laws itself had to
be brought. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare the
Aristotelian theory of the fall of bodies with the explanation furnished
by Galileo. Aristotle is concerned solely with the concepts "high" and
"low," "own proper place" as distinguished from "place occupied,"
"natural movement" and "forced movement;"[86] the physical law in virtue
of which the stone falls expresses for him that the stone regains the
"natural place" of all stones, to wit, the earth. The stone, in his
view, is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal place; in
falling back into this place it aims at completing itself, like a living
being that grows, thus realizing fully the essence of the genus
stone.[87] If this conception of the physical law were exact, the law
would no longer be a mere relation established by the mind; the
subdivision of matter into bodies would no longer be relative to our
faculty of perceiving; all bodies would have the same individuality as
living bodies, and the laws of the physical universe would express
relations of real kinship between real genera. We know what kind of
physics grew out of this, and how, for having believed in a science
unique and final, embracing the totality of the real and at one with the
absolute, the ancients were confined, in fact, to a more or less clumsy
interpretation of the physical in terms of the vital.

But there is the same confusion in the moderns, with this difference,
however, that the relation between the two terms is inverted: laws are
no longer reduced to genera, but genera to laws; and science, still
supposed to be uniquely one, becomes altogether relative, instead of
being, as the ancients wished, altogether at one with the absolute. A
noteworthy fact is the eclipse of the problem of genera in modern
philosophy. Our theory of knowledge turns almost entirely on the
question of laws: genera are left to make shift with laws as best they
can. The reason is, that modern philosophy has its point of departure in
the great astronomical and physical discoveries of modern times. The
laws of Kepler and of Galileo have remained for it the ideal and unique
type of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation between things or
between facts. More precisely, a law of mathematical form expresses the
fact that a certain magnitude is a function of one or several other
variables appropriately chos