Sec. 30. All and every law follows as a necessary consequence from the
persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter.[20] That this
must be so is evident if we consider that, were it not so, force could not
be permanent nor matter constant. For instance, if action and reaction were
not invariably equal and opposite, force would not be invariably
persistent, seeing that in no case can the formula fail, unless some one or
other of the forces concerned, or parts of them, disappear. And as with a
simple law of this kind, so with every other natural law and
inter-operation of laws, howsoever complex such inter-operation may be; for
it is manifest that if in any case similar antecedents did not determine
similar consequents, on one or other of these occasions some quantum of
force, or of matter, or of both, must have disappeared--or, which is the
same thing, the law of causation cannot have been constant. Every natural
law, therefore, may be defined as the formula of a sequence, which must
either ensue upon certain forces of a given intensity impinging upon
certain given quantities, kinds, and forms of matter, or else, by not
ensuing, prove that the force or the matter concerned were not of a
permanent nature.
Sec. 31. The argument, then, which was elaborated in Sec. 29, and which has so
long and so generally received the popular sanction in the common-sense
epitome, that in the last record there must be mind in external nature,
since "that which it requires thought and reason to understand must itself
be thought and reason,"--this argument, I say, must now for ever be
abandoned by reasonable men.
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