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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 thirty 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 loses 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 Platonisers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.[27] I may cite a passage which is quite in the vein of Philo:–

We have seen powerful evidences that the construction of this globe and its associates; and, inferentially, that of all the other globes in space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are the expression of His will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws which are in like manner an expression of His will? (p. 154, 1st edition).

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 those more than Homeric contests in which the big laws “wreck” the little ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the preacher’s discourse must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be attributed to the author of the “Vestiges.”

But the author of the “Vestiges” is not the only writer who is responsible for the current pseudo-scientific mystifications which hang about the term “law.” When I wrote my paper about “Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Realism,” I had not read a work by the Duke of Argyll, “The Reign of Law,” which, I believe, has enjoyed, possibly still enjoys, a widespread popularity. But the vivacity of the Duke’s attack led me to think it possible that criticisms directed elsewhere might have come home to him. And, in fact, I find that the second chapter of the work in question, which is entitled “Law; its definitions,” is, from my point of view, a sort of “summa” of pseudo-scientific philosophy. It will be worth while to examine it in some detail.