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The style of each of such eminent masters becomes henceforth in some sort a property of the language itself; words, phrases, collocations, and structure, which hitherto did not exist, gradually passing into the conversation and the composition of the educated classes. Now I will attempt to show how this process of improvement is effected, and what is its limit.
To account for a law of nature means, and can mean, nothing more than to assign other laws more general, together with collocations, which laws and collocations being supposed, the partial law follows without any additional supposition. Miscellaneous Examples Of The Explanation Of Laws Of Nature.
Now, it might always have been said with acknowledged correctness, that a force and a collocation were both of them necessary to produce any phenomenon. The law of causation is, that change can only be produced by change. Along with any number of stationary antecedents, which are collocations, there must be at least one changing antecedent, which is a force.
Hence, in the infinite number of these changes and combinations in the countless collocations of molecules and chemically changed conditions of matter, we have the possibilities of all terrestrial life-manifestations, as we have, in the infinite number of cosmical changes, the possibilities of all planetary, cometary, and asteroidal manifestations.
Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and painstaking adroitness.
Now, as we have seen, Locke himself has shown in his other trains of argument that this challenge is thoroughly futile as a refutation of possibilities; but the point to which I now wish to draw attention is this It does not follow because certain and highly complex collocations of material particles may be supposed capable of thinking, that therefore every particle of matter must be regarded as having this attribute.
The past duration of a cause is a guarantee for its future existence, unless something occurs to destroy it; but the existence of a cause in one or any number of places is no guarantee for its existence in any other place, since there is no uniformity in the collocations of primeval causes.
All the explanations of the order of the universe which materialists, from Democritus and Epicurus to Diderot and Lange, have devised, rest on the assumption that the elements of matter, being eternal, must pass through infinite combinations, and that one of these must be our present world a special collocation among the countless millions of collocations, past and future.
To account for a law of nature means, and can mean, nothing more than to assign other laws more general, together with collocations, which laws and collocations being supposed, the partial law follows without any additional supposition.
If we suppose, then, the subject-matter of any generalization to be so widely diffused that there is no time, no place, and no combination of circumstances, but must afford an example either of its truth or of its falsity, and if it be never found otherwise than true, its truth can not be contingent on any collocations, unless such as exist at all times and places; nor can it be frustrated by any counteracting agencies, unless by such as never actually occur.
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