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Updated: May 20, 2025
For his poetic and his literary aspirations were alike addressed immediately to life, and though he did not seek a practical end with absolute invariability, yet he ever had a practical aim before his eyes, whether it was near or far.
But Mr Mill's own reasoning on the same side is of a still higher order, enlarging the grounds previously urged in the last book of his 'System of Logic, He protests against the term Necessity; and discards the idea of Necessity, if it be understood to imply anything more than invariability of antecedence and consequence. But does consciousness really attest what is called Free-will?
Later, when the relation of the sun to the courses of the planets was established, the sun came to be looked upon as a cause; and finally, early in the seventeenth century, for the first time in history, it began to be recognised that the laws of dynamics, exactly as they had been established for our own terrestrial world, hold good, with the same rigid invariability, at least as far as the limits of the solar system.
The two axioms which he launched upon the world the supremacy of reason, and the invariability of natural laws struck directly at the foundations of orthodoxy. Pascal was attacking Cartesianism when he made his memorable attempt to discredit the authority of reason, by showing that it is feeble and deceptive.
Absolution may even be extended to the calculating individual who ravenously times his arrival by the supper hour; but, for a simple-minded person, unaccustomed to the usages of polite society, to believe in the invariability of fixed appointments and, taking an invitation au pied de la lettre, make his appearance a full hour before any other guest would dare to "turn up," from the fear of being thought unfashionable, is simply monstrous!
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
This magnitude, thus defined by the conditions of a natural motion which may itself be modified, does not seem to offer all the guarantees desirable from the point of view of invariability. It is certain that all the friction exercised on the earth by the tides, for instance must slowly lengthen the duration of the day, and must influence the movement of the earth round the sun.
Now the whole structure of science would be hopelessly undermined had not scientific men come to have the fullest confidence in the invariability of certain of these sequences of events. Let us, for example, take the familiar and fundamental observation that any unsupported object, having what we term weight, invariably falls directly towards the centre of the earth.
It is said, that there is nothing marvellous in the colours of those Egyptian monuments which have been the admiration of ages; the secret of their duration is supposed to depend simply on the fineness of the climate and invariability of the temperature. But "Griselda will admit no wandering muse." Mrs.
And science does not rest for us on sure foundations unless the invariability of the laws of nature is admitted. If we do not accept this hypothesis, if we consider it possible that the uniformities of the natural world may be changed from time to time, we have no guarantee that science can progress indefinitely.
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