J O H N

R.

M I L T O N

The origin and development of the concept of the Haws of nature'

i
THE

I D E A of explaining natural phenomena by appealing to laws of nature is one that is thoroughly familiar to the modern mind. This idea does not perhaps appear quite as natural as it did a century ago, when Engels proclaimed to the mourners at Marx's funeral that just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature so Marx had discovered the law of development of human history. Twentieth-century historians do not in general conceive their task as including the formulation of laws of history, and the discoveries of modern physics since Maxwell have for the most part been expressed in terms of principles and equations rather than laws. Nevertheless, despite these changes, we are still quite accustomed to thinking in terms of laws of nature; and just because it seems natural it is easy to assume that it is natural for human beings seeking to explain the phenomena of nature to do so by enquiring after the laws by which these phenomena are governed. It ought however to be clear to any reasonably attentive reader of what survives of Greek science and philosophy that the Greeks did not conceive of physical explanation in this way. There are two main reasons why this is not always realised. One is that many modern writers talk about laws in places where the Greeks themselves did not: thus we find references in writers such as Marshall Clagett and S. Sambursky to Aristotle's laws of motion, to the law of the lever, to sublunary and celestial bodies obeying different laws, and so on (i). To avoid altogether expressions such as these is far from easy. There can be no doubt that historians of the standing of Clagett and Sam(i) Cf. the accounts of Aristotelian and later dynamics in M. CLAGETT, Greek Science in Antiquity (New York 1955), pp. 64-72, 169-177, in S. SAMBURSKY, The Physical World of the Greeks (London 1956), pp. 92-94 and The Physical World of Late Antiquity (London 1962), pp. 62-70.

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bursky are fully aware that they are using modern concepts as an aid in exposition, but their more innocent readers (perhaps largely unacquainted with the original texts) might easily be misled. A second and far more insidious danger is mistranslation. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Sir Karl Popper quotes one of his heroes, Democritus, as saying that he 'would rather find a single causal law than be the King of Persia' (2). How many of the numerous readers of that highly influential book are aware that there is nothing in the original corresponding to Popper's 'law' ? (3). To be fair to Popper, even classical scholars are not always immune from this kind of error: there are several instances in the Oxford translation of Aristotle, for example at Physics 253b2Jj, and De Generatione et
Corruptione 336327.

By the time that we eliminate all these translational artefacts the number of genuine references in classical Greek thought to a law or laws of nature can be seen to be very small indeed. If we exclude those that are concerned purely with morality rather than natural science there remain only one in the whole of Plato (4) and one in Aristotle (5). Neither is typical. Plato was concerned with the working of the human body, Aristotle with Pythagorean number mysticism. Aristotle's own thought about nature is entirely free from legal concepts and even legal metaphors. It is not difficult to discover why no distinct notion of a law of nature ever came to be developed in the classical period. The sophists had made the antithesis between nomos and phusis part of the mental furniture of the age, and any attempt that might be made to combine the two and speak of a 'law of nature' would inevitably carry an air of self-conscious paradox. This artificiality is clearly present in the first surviving use of the phrase, by Callicles in the Gorgias, in the course of an argument to justify the rule of the strong over the weak (6). Conceptual antitheses such as this frequently bring about a modification in the meaning of one or both terms. The contrast with phusis shifted the meaning of nomos in such a way that in many cases where it occurs the correct translation cannot possibly be 'law' but instead must be 'convention' or something similar. Democritus,
(2) K. R. POPPER, The Open Society and its Enemies (London 1945; 5th edition, 1966), vol. II, p. 27. (3) A. [...] gAsye PoiiXeofiai liSAXov ixiav eupstv aE-noAoytav ft rtv Ilspooiv ot PaoiXelav -feva6ai, H. DiELS, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1903; 6th edition, rev. W. Kranz, 1951. Henceforth cited as DielsKranz), 68 B 118. (4) Timaeus, &3e. (5) De Caelo, 268314. (6) Gorgias, 483c.

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for example, maintained that bitter, sweet, hot and cold exist nomdby convention, relatively to the human senses (7); and Empedocles remarked that, though what men think of as birth and death are really only the assembly and dispersal of pre-existing parts, nevertheless he also will continue to speak nomoin accordance with the (mistaken) conventions of men (8). The extent to which the antithesis was taken for granted among the educated can be seen from Aristotle's characteristically detached account of how best to go about confusing your opponent in debate. This whole topic of nomos and phusis, he remarked, provides quite exceptionally good ground for generating paradoxes: when your opponent starts talking in terms of nature, you reply in terms of law, and vice versa (9). It is therefore hardly surprising that (apart from the one, very marginal, passage in the De Caelo already mentioned) Aristotle never used the notion of a law of nature at any point in all his scientific investigations or in the formal discussion of scientific method in the
Posterior Analytics.

We can therefore say with certainty that the concepts of a (scientific) law of nature came into use at some time after Aristotle (10). It is also apparent that by the end of the seventeenth century the idea of explaining natural phenomena by appealing to laws had become familiar and generally acceptable, at least among the scientifically educated. We can see this from the supreme achievement of the age, Newton's Principia. The formal structure of Book I of the Principia is Euclidean, but there is one major difference. After the initial definitions and associated scholia, we find the next section headed not simply Axioms but Axioms or laws of motion (11). The old familiar Aristotelian-Euclidean word and the new word stand side by side. Newton used the latter because it was appropriate but also because it would be readily understood and accepted by his contemporaries. In this he was certainly not mistaken. To give one example among many, in the earlier discussions between Wren, Wallis, Huygens
(7) Diels-Kranz, 68 B 9. (8) Diels-Kranz, 31 B 9. (9) De Sophisticis Elenchis, 17337-18. (10) Juridical notions do appear among the Presocratics in connection with nature, e.g. in Anaximander (Diels-Kranz, 12 B 1) and Heraclitus (Diels-Kranz, 22 B 94) but the thought is very unlike the later conception. This line of thought, associating justice in nature with balance and harmony, anticipates the science of Aristotle and Archimedes, not of Descartes and Newton. (11) Isaac NEWTON, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, edited by A. KOYIUS and I. B. COHEN (Cambridge 1972), pp. 55-56. On the early drafts of this section, see I. B. COHEN, An Introduction to Newton's Principia (Cambridge 1971), pp. 62-66.

JOHN R. MILTON

and Oldenburg concerning the motion of colliding bodies the phrase 'law of motion' was in constant use (12). The change to the modern conception of a scientific law therefore took place at some time between the late fourth century B.C. and the seventeenth century of our era. The questions which naturally now arise are two in number. First when did the change occur and over (approximately) what space of time? Secondly what particular explanation, and more generally what type of explanation can be provided for it ? It might seem that we ought to leave aside the second of these questions until we have answered the first. After all, explaining a change which has not even been securely dated appears to be a hazardous and indeed potentially futile proceeding. Dangers such as these are certainly not to be despised, but it can be shown that the alternative procedure also has considerable, though less obviously visible, disadvantages. Suppose, for example, that we decide to start by assembling as many references to laws of nature as we can find within the period from Aristotle to Newton. The resulting pile might be large enough to dishearten all but hardened lexicographers, but that would be one of the least of our problems. The real difficulty would be in deciding what ought and what ought not to be included. We might decide to include every occurrence of the phrase 'law of nature', lex naturae, vojxo? ir\c, cpuosac, and their modern equivalents. This would clearly bring in many wholly non-scientific occurrences (particularly of lex naturae); it would also clearly leave much out, especially when the qualifier 'of nature' is absent. Laws of motion are unquestionably relevant, for example. Again, should the occurrences of lex naturalis (usually found in moral and legal contexts) be omitted from such a deliberately Baconian initial survey ? Most perplexing of all is the question of what should be done with words which may or may not be equivalent to lex and nomos. Thesmos (roughly, ordinance) ought certainly to be included in the Greek list, but what about logos or ius? Two examples, one ancient, one modern, should make clear the seriousness of this difficulty. Lucretius used the word lex on three occasions in connection with the natural world, though scarcely in a modern sense (13). He also used foedus naturae on a further six occasions (14). Should these latter be included ? The answer turns on whether the conceptual
(12) The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, edited by A. R. HALL and M. B. HALL (Madison 1967-), vol. V, pp. 103, 117, 125, 167, 193, 221, 319-20, 358. (13) De Rerum Natura, ii. 719, iii. 687, v.58. (14) Ibid. 1.586, ii.302, v.57, 310, 924, vi.906.

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difference between foedus and lex is important or not, and this cannot be established merely by studying the dictionary definitions of the two words. Huygens also used a variety of words. On some occasions he followed Descartes in speaking of the laws governing collisions, but more often than not he preferred to speak of regies or regulae. Is the distinction of any significance? Sometimes, almost certainly it is not. For example, in successive letters to R.F. de Sluse, Huygens referred first to the rules and then to the laws of motion (15); it is unlikely that he intended to make a distinction of any kind. On the other hand, if we consider lex and regula to be equivalent in general, then, we create further difficulties, in particular with writers like Galileo who use the latter expression (16) but not (in their strictly scientific work) the former. It appears therefore that an adequate collection of material cannot be made in advance of any attempt to discuss its significance. The situation is familiar to natural scientists, and especially to historians of science. The idea of beginning by compiling a natural history of the relevant material is chimerical, because what is and what is not relevant can only be discovered in the course of investigation. History is not a science, and would-be historians who ignore this do so at their peril, but it can be appropriate under some circumstances to imitate the methods of the natural sciences and put forward a hypothesis.

II Before one proposes a new hypothesis it is in general advisable to explain why those hypotheses already in the field appear to be inadequate. Of these two are particularly important: one is sociological (17), looking for an explanation in the social and economic changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the other is perhaps best described as pragmatic, in that it supposes that scientists in the seventeenth century first made discoveries that could best be
(15) Christiaan HUYGENS, (Euvres complites (The Hague 1888-1950), vol. II, pp. 79, 115. (16) La regola dell'accelerazione ne i gravi cadenti, Discorsi, in A. FAVARO (ed.), Opere di Galileo Galilei (Florence 1929I939)> vol. VIII, p. 374 (cf- P- 275). (17) This is not, of course, to say that all or even most sociologists would find it plausible. Although Zilsel's debt to Marxist thought is obvious, it does not seem appropriate to classify as Marxist the type of explanation he offers. Analogous social explanations are sometimes widely accepted by non-Marxist historiansfor example Zeller's explanation of the character of post-Aristotelian thought by reference to the changed political world after the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander,

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thought of as laws, and as a result came (almost by accident) to the idea of laws of nature. i. The classic formulation of the sociological hypothesis was made by Edgar Zilsel in his 1942 paper (18). His analysis is taken over, with a little additional material, by Needham in volume II of Science and Civilization in China (19), though Needham adds nothing to Zilsel's main argument. Zilsel's thesis is that the idea of applying legal concepts to nature is ultimately of Jewish origin (20). It lay dormant in the uncongenial climate of the Middle Ages and revived with the development of early capitalism:
How could medieval theologians speak of the legislature of God, when the power of the prince was very limited ? The idea, however, had not originated in feudalism. It had been conceived under entirely different sociological conditions. Its authors were Jews who had outgrown their past of Bedouin clan-organization centuries ago, and its sociological pattern was the despotism of ancient oriental states. The idea could be preserved in a rudimentary form through two thousand years, even through a period in which it did not fit the sociological conditions, till it awoke to new life in early capitalistic absolutism (21).

What, one might reasonably ask, was it about early capitalism that was so propitious ? Zilsel provided two different and not obviously compatible answers. One is in terms of the activity of artisans:
We cannot explain here why at the time of Galileo the idea of mechanical regularities arose. This explanation exceeds our present task, since it is linked with the much more general problem of the origin of experimental science and the quantitative spirit, and will be attempted at another place. Here it may be indicated only that in all civilizations experimentation originates in handicraft. In the period of nascent capitalism experimenting artisans began to look for quantitative rules of operation. The roots of these mechanical rules, therefore, must be searched for in the sociological and technological conditions of handicraft in the early modern era. They rose to science in Galileo (22).

The other explanation is of a quite different character:

It is not a mere chance that the Cartesian idea of God, the legislator of the universe, developed forty years after Bodin's theory of sovereignty. Perhaps it is not even a coincidence that both thinkers were French: France was the native country of centralized absolutism. At any rate the doctrine of universal natural laws of divine origin is possible only in a state with rational statute law and fully developed central sovereignty (23).

(18) Edgar ZILSEL, The genesis of the concept of physical law, Philosophical Review, LI (1942), pp. 245-279. (19) J. NEEDHAM, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge 1954-), vol. II,

ch. 18, esp. pp. 533-543. (20) ZILSEL, op. cit. pp. 247-249. (21) Ibid. p. 279. (22) Ibid. p. 276. (23) Ibid. pp. 278-279.

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Neither of these explanations seems plausible, (a) Highly skilled artisans and craftsmen have flourished in most civilizations. It is not at all clear why the craft rules that had always existed should have taken on a new significance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is certainly not established that the activities of artisans had any appreciable effect in bringing about the scientific revolution. The relevance of craft-rules to the central discipline of astronomy is evidently minimal, and the prima facie rather more plausible case for a significant influence of practical gunnery on the other central discipline of dynamics evaporates on closer enquiry (24). Even apart from these more general considerations, there is one fatal objection to the particular theses put forward by Zilsel. If it were true that the modern idea of a law of nature has its roots in the time when 'experimenting artisans began to look for quantitative rules of operation' (25), then the first things to be called laws would be lowlevel generalisations derived from these craft rules. It is however clear from the evidence which Zilsel himself cites that the very opposite was the case. As he rightly says (26), it was in Descartes that the concept of a law of nature first occurs fully developed; and Descartes used it solely (27) for the fundamental laws of motion, which were not and indeed in the Cartesian system (in some cases) could not be reports of experience. The problem of arranging any experimental demonstration of Newton's first law is well known, but in the Cartesian system the same law has a positively counter/actual quality, insofar as the requirement that there should be no external action on the body is necessarily incapable of fulfilment if a vacuum is impossible. When he was discussing empirical generalisations on the other hand, Descartes did not use any word meaning 'law'. We now think of the law of refraction: Descartes enquired instead for la raison ou proportion qui est entre ses angles (28). The same pattern of usage is found in later writers in the century. (b) The other explanation is more sophisticated: it could perhaps be described as the pure Marxist explanation, in contrast with the
(24) A. R. HALL, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge 1952), esp. pp. 36-56. (25) ZILSEL, op. cit. p. 276. (26) Ibid. p. 267. (27) Contrary to Zilsel's statement (p. 268 n. 83) Descartes did not describe the law of refraction as a law. In the place Zilsel alleges (Dioptrique, ii) Descartes merely said that 'l'action de la lumiere suit en cecy les mesmes loix que le movement de cete bale'the ball being a tennis ball projected obliquely towards a surface. R. DESCARTES, CEuvres, edited C. ADAM and P. TANNERY (new edition: Paris 1965), Vol. VI, p. 100. (28) Ibid. p. 101.

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vulgar Marxist explanation just considered. It is more theoretically sophisticated but its empirical basis in no more adequate. Absolute rule, unhampered by effective institutional constraints, is after all one of the most common of all kinds of government, and one that has been experienced by much of the human race in forms far more extreme than anything desired by Bodin or achieved by the French monarchy (29), without the concomitant appearance of any concept of the world being governed by laws. Zilsel's rhetorical question, 'How could medieval theologians speak of the legislature of God when the power of the prince was very limited ?' (30) can be very simply answered. They had no difficulty at all, and if Zilsel had read any medieval authors other than Aquinas (31) he would have seen this. Elaborate discussions of the limits (if any) to the absolute power of God took place centuries before anything that can be described as an absolute state began to exist in Western Europe; they are indeed one of the most characteristic features of late medieval philosophy and theology. It is very misleading to imagine that in this period theological ideas merely reflect political ideas, programmes or institutions. Very often the reverse is the case: ways of thinking first appear in theology and are only subsequently transposed to politics. In the later Middle Ages some theologians had ascribed to God an absolute power to choose moral laws, a doctrine which even Calvin described as detestable (32). Only much later was a similar theory in politics to appal the contemporaries of Hobbes. 2. The alternative, pragmatic, explanation is that the theoretical acceptance of the notion of a law of nature resulted from its practical employment. On this view scientists began to think in terms of laws of nature because they had discovered explanatory principles which could most appropriately be interpreted as laws (33). This
(29) K. WITTFOGEL, Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1957), passim. (30) ZILSEL, op. cit. p. 279. (31) Zilsel did not read even Aquinas carefully enough. He claims that 'the metaphorical character of the term "law", when applied to unreasonable beings was not noticed before Suarez', op. cit. p. 279. In fact Aquinas explicitly said that the law in which irrational creatures participate non potest did lex nisi per similitudinem, Summa Theologiae, I* II a e , q.91 a.2 ad 3. Suarez was following Aquinas, not making an innovation. What innovation there is is in the opposite direction, as when Hooker 18O dropped this qualification and referred quite simply to irrational creatures obeying laws, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I. iii. 3-4. (32) The Institutes of the Christian Religion, III. xxiii. 2. (33) This appears to be the thesis of Paolo Casini: ' Pour s*en tenir tout simplement a la terminologie, on s'attendrait de voir apparaitre le mot " loi " en mSme temps que la chose : c'est-a-dire au moment ou les cadres intellectuels de l'ancienne physique sont bouleverse's par le nouveau critere de la quantity, par la ge'om&risation de l'image du monde. En r&lit^, la chose s'est imposee

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kind of explanation does have attractive featuresnot least because some of its analogues in neighbouring fields do appear to be right. It is at least plausible to think of modern scientific method as being primarily a creation of working scientists, something only subsequently (and imperfectly) abstracted, articulated and developed by philosophers of science. Certainly the much-trumpeted methods announced in the first half of the seventeenth century by Bacon and Descartes were at best only intermittently relevant to what scientists actually needed to do. This explanation has however to be rejected simply on historical grounds. Scientists and philosophers in the seventeenth century and even earlier referred quite freely to the laws of nature, even at a time when very few had been discovered and when those that had been were not usually described as laws. Some examples may provide an indication of this. Galileo, to the best of my knowledge, never referred to any of the propositions he had discovered in mechanics as lawshe spoke of them as theorems or propositions or rules. It is significant that the only reference to physical laws in all of Galileo's writings comes in a letter to his pupil Benedetto Castelli, the most important parts of which were later incorporated almost without change in the more well-known Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, perhaps the nearest thing to a work of theology that Galileo ever wrote. In both letters he described nature as 'the most observant executrix of the orders of God, obeying the laws (leggi) imposed on her' (34). The theological context and lack of scientific content of these phrases is significant. The idea of laws of nature was a theological inheritance quite foreign to the Archimedean paradigms Galileo followed in the formal exposition of his mechanics. Kepler also referred on a number of occasions to laws of nature (35), but he never used the word for what we now call Kepler's laws. Descartes never described the sine law of refraction as a law, even though he did refer very frequently to laws of motion, both vaguely and generally and in precisely specified terms, especially
in Part II of the Principles of Philosophy (36).

More than anyone else, Descartes established and made respectable

avant le mot; l'usage du terme " loi " s'est generalise de facon curieusement tardive'. P. CASINI, La loi naturelle : reflexion politique et sciences exactes, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, CLI <i976), pp. 423-424. (34) GALILEO, Opere, vol. V, pp. 282283, 316. (35) J. KEPLER, Gesammelte Werke (Munich 1937-1975), vol. VII, p. 328. I owe this reference to Casini (n. 36 above), who however wrongly attributes it to pp. 326-327. (36) The Principles of Philosophy, ii. 37ft; Le Monde, ch. vii.

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the new terminolgy. Boyle used the word very frequently indeed in his physico-theological writings (37). The exact content of these laws of nature or laws of motion is usually left unspecified, though Boyle did occasionally refer to the Cartesian laws of inertia and impact (38). The proposition which he never referred to as a law was what we now know as Boyle's law: this, with suitable modesty, he described as a hypothesis (39). In fact it is not until Hooke that we find someone describing an empirically determined regularity of their own discovery as 'a rule or law of nature' (40). By this time (De Potentia Restitutiva was published in 1678) the appropriateness of thinking in terms of laws of motion was accepted by almost everyone, and the new terminology was beginning to be applied in other contexts than that for which it had first been devised. This suggestion that scientists discovered laws of nature because they were already thinking of nature in law-like terms, and not the other way round, is further confirmed by the fact that talk of laws of nature (in a physical, not a moral sense) was current among European thinkers before the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century had even begun to be made. Going back in time we find some conception of physical laws of nature in Francis Bacon (41), Richard Hooker (42), Calvin (43) and Melanchthon (44). James 1, according to Bacon (for our purposes the correctness of the attribution is irrelevant) announced to his courtiers 'that kings ruled by the laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as rarely to put in
(37) The fullest treatment is in section vii of A Free Enquiry into the commonly Received Notion of Nature, in Works (London, 1772), vol. V, pp. 219-227. See also vol. IV, pp. 161-164, vol. V, pp. 139-140, pp. 413-414 and pp. 520-521. (38) BOYLE, Works, vol. V, p. 399. (39) Ibid. vol. I, p. 151. (40) Robert HOOKE, De Potentia Restitutiva (London 1678), reproduced in facsimile in R. GUNTHER, Early Science in Oxford (Oxford 1921-1945), vol. VIII, PP- 334> 336(41) Bacon's use of the word 'law' is numerous and not obviously consistent. The most apparently modern uses are in De Principiis atque Originibus, in J. SPEDDING, R. L. ELLIS and D. D. HEATH (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon (London 1874), vol. Ill, p. 115 (English translation, vol. V, p. 496); and in Novum Organum, i. 75, ii.2, ii.5, ii.17. 182 (42) Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I. iii.4. (43) The Institutes of the Christian Religion, I. xvi.5. Calvin on the whole avoided law terminology, even though he thought of the world as a machine obeying the direct commands of God; the reason appears to be that he thought of all God's commands as special commands regulating particular events. Every single year, month and day is regulated by a new and special providence of God (I. xvi.2). The existence of exceptionless universal laws would suggest, contrary to Calvin's intentions, that God is more interested in the broad outline of what happens than in particular events. (44) Francis OAKLEY, Christian theology and Newtonian science: the rise of the concept of the laws of nature, Church History, XXX (1961), p. 455 n. 84. This is an invaluable piece of research which deserves to be better known than it apparently is.

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LAWS OF NATURE

use their supreme prerogative, as God doth his power of working miracles' (45). James 1 was certainly in no position to state any of the laws of nature, but neither he nor his audience would have regarded this as any reason to avoid such legal language. Even in the Middle Ages, pace Zilsel, we can find similar ideas. There are references to laws ordained by God for the regulation of nature in several later medieval authors, notably in Gabriel Biel (46), Jean Gerson (47), Pierre d'Ailly (48), Nicole Oresme (49) and William of Ockham (50)and, further back into the thirteenth century, in Roger Bacon (51). A few isolated references might be brushed aside, but hardly a list such as this, incomplete as it certainly must be. Men were thinking of nature as governed by laws long before they were in a position to state any of the laws themselves. Ill Laws of nature were not the first explanatory principles to be devised for the purpose of understanding the phenomena of nature. The growing acceptance of the idea of a world governed by laws was necessarily accompanied by a rejection of the Aristotelian physics of substantial forms and real qualities. It is therefore more appropriate and useful to ask not simply how the idea of laws of nature arose, but rather how this new principle of explanation was able to displace the old and well-established Aristotelian theory. Historians and philosophers of science are now quite familiar with the idea that theories are not abandoned as soon as they fail to account for phenomena. Anomalies are clearly unwelcome and strenuous attempts are usually made to remove them, but quite large numbers can be tolerated if there appears to be no alternative to doing so. Broadly speaking, a theory will be discarded only when some superior replacement becomes available. The changes that take place in philosophy can be thought of in a similar manner, the
(45) Francis BACON, The Advancement of Learning, Works, vol. Ill, p. 429. (46) G. B:EL, Collectorium super quattuor libros sententiarum, lib. I, d. 17 q. 1 art. 3,
ed. W. WERBECK and U. HOFMANN (Tiibin-

n. 25. (48) OAKLEY, op. cit., p. 444 & n. (49) Oresme uses 'ordenance' rather than 'loi'. Livre du Ciel et du Monde, ed.
A. D. MENUT and A. J. DENOMY (Madison

gen 1973-). vol. I, p. 419. (47) Quoted by H. OBERMAN, Reformation and revolution: Copernicus' discovery in an era of change, in J. E. MURDOCH and E. D. SYLLA (eds), The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning (Dordrecht 1975), p. 425

I9<>8). P- 228. (50) OCKHAM, Quodlibetae Septem (Strasbourg 1491), VI. q.i. (51) There are numerous references in Opus Maius, part. IV, dist. ii, 4.

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most important difference being that the problems associated with philosophical positions are primarily internal and conceptual rather than external and empirical. There are two conditions which must in general be fulfilled if a philosophical position is to be abandoned: severe internal difficulties, and the existence of some superior (or at least potentially superior) alternative. In the absence of the latter any well-developed philosophical outlook will usually retain its hold, despite a general acknowledgement of puzzles, obscurities and even incoherences. The requirements for the replacement of explanation in terms of essences and substantial forms by explanations in terms of laws of nature are therefore two: the first is a rejection of the realistic metaphysics on which both Aristotle's theory of demonstration and his natural philosophy are unmistakably (though somewhat obscurely) grounded; the second is a conception of the world which makes it possible and indeed appropriate to speak of nature obeying laws, not just poetically or in daring metaphor, but in literal and prosaic truth. These considerations suggest the hypothesis that the beginnings of the change in thought which led men to think of the physical world as being governed by laws can be found in the early fourteenth century. It was then that a series of thinkers, the first and greatest of whom was the English Franciscan, William of Ockham, developed a philosophy which included among its main elements both a complete rejection of the metaphysical realism maintained by Aristotle and the earlier scholastics and an exceptionally strong emphasis on the absolute freedom and omnipotence of God, especially in relation to the works of creation (52). This school of thought has been given a number of names, none of them entirely satisfactory. It has most often been described, especially by historians, as the Nominalist movement. This name is perhaps the least unsatisfactory, but one caveat is necessary. It is not only the nominalist element which is of historical significance; the voluntarist emphasis on divine sovereignty is equally important. Nominalism has often been misunderstood in the past, perhaps because of the associations of the word itself. Properly conceived, nominalism has nothing to do with names. It is, quite precisely,
(52) The most detailed exposition of Ockham's nominalistic metaphysics is in distinction ii, questions 4-8 of the Ordinatio, the first book of his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Unfortunately no full translation exists, but a critical edition of the Latin text can now be found in his Opera Theologica (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1967-), vol. II, pp. 99-292.

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the thesis that everything which exists is an individual, and is moreover an individual in itself, and not merely as a result of any metaphysical process by which something originally non-individual is made individual through the agency of a principle of individuation. The distinction between nominalists and realists is therefore quite sharp. Particular philosophers may be difficult to classify as nominalists or realists, either because they are muddled, inconsistent, vague or deliberately evasive, or else because they simply had no views on the question; nevertheless one cannot properly be a semi-nominalist, a moderate nominalist or an ultra-nominalist. The metaphysics involved in the dispute between nominalists and realists is certainly difficult and may well appear obscuremost nominalists are indeed likely to deny that their opponents' position can even be coherently formulated. The consequences of nominalism on the other hand are clear enough. For a nominalist the world contains only individuals, and nothing else. Voluntarism is less capable of precise definition. Its central idea (here names are, for once, not misleading) is of things being made by some exercise of the will. Hence ethical voluntarism bases ethics on moral rules chosen either by God or by human beings. As far as the physical world is concerned the only will that could be relevant is the will of God. The world was made either by God or by nobody, but in any case certainly not by us. In the present context, therefore, voluntarism may be thought of as the view that the world owes both its existence and its nature to a free choice of God. Some element of voluntarism is clearly a part of any theology with even the most tenuous claims to Christian orthodoxy, although it is certainly possible for two people to put very different emphases on a doctrine which they officially hold in common. In fact the character of voluntarist theology becomes most clearly apparent when it is set beside the thought of a philosopher who rejected it completely. Spinoza held that the nature of everything necessarily flows from God's nature in the very same way that theorems about triangles flow from the nature of a triangle (53), and therefore that things could not have been produced by God in any other manner or order than that in which they were produced (54). This association with a voluntaristic theology explains the fact, noted earlier, that the word 'law' was originally used only in connection with the most fundamental processes of nature, and not with mere
(53) Ethics, book I, prop, xvii, note. (54) Ethics, book I, prop, xxxiii.

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regularities among phenomena. The memory of this reservation of the word 'law' survived long enough for J. Stuart Mill to record it:
The expression law of nature has generally been employed with a sort of tacit reference to the original sense of the word 'law', namely the expression of the will of a superior. When therefore it appeared that any of the uniformities which were observed in nature would result spontaneously from certain other uniformities, no separate act of the creative will being supposed necessary for the production of the derivative uniformities, these have not usually been spoken of as laws of nature (55).

It was the combined impact of these nominalist and voluntarist currents of thought that slowly undermined the old Aristotelian philosophy and prepared the way for the new idea of divinely imposed laws of nature. These changes first began to be visible in the early fourteenth century. By then voluntaristic and nominalistic ways of thinking each possessed a long history. Belief in a divine legislator for nature was not characteristic of Greek thought. The gods and goddesses of the Homeric pantheon are superhuman rather than supernatural. They are themselves part of nature, as are the remote unconcerned deities postulated by Epicurus. Aristotle's God is supernatural if anything is, but he (or perhaps itthe personal pronoun hardly appears appropriate) is related to the world only as a final cause. The demiurge of the Timaeus is an efficient cause of a kind, but he does not induce order in the world through the imposition of laws. The God of the Stoics interpenetrates and organizes everything like a wise, benevolent gas, but is neither transcendent nor a lawgiver. Cleanthes, it is true, did describe Zeus as the ruler of nature, governing all things by law (56), but here the contextthe Hymn to Zeusmust be taken into account. The terms in which Zeus is conceived owe at least as much to ordinary unphilosophical piety as to Stoic physics. Apart from this the nearest approach in pagan Greek thought to the later conception of a divine lawgiver to nature is in the part-Aristotelian, part-Stoic De Mundo (written, it is thought, at some time between 40 B.C. and A.D. 140). Here the unknown author does (once) describe God as ruling the world by means of laws (thesmois) (57). He also describes God as actually being a law (notnos) a few lines earlier (58). This lack of precision is an indication of the marginal character of the concept in his thought. God is in any case not conceived as a transcendent creator: he is literally situated at the circumference of the world and
(55) A System of Logic, IH.iv.i. (56) H. von ARNIM, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Leipzig 1903-24), I. 537. Henceforth abbreviated to SVF. (57) [Aristotle], De Mundo, 4013/0. (58) Ibid. 4oobz8.

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manipulates it as a puppet-master manipulates his puppets, influencing the more remote parts such as the earth only indirectly (59). In Roman thought references to laws in connection with nature are slightly more common. In addition to the references in Lucretius, quoted earlier, there are others in Manilius (60) and in Ovid (61). The reason for these is not entirely clear. Roman law may have some influence, but so would the greater detachment of these authors especially Ovid, from the mainstream of the Greek philosophical tradition. The poetic character of all these references is in any case apparent. None of them derives from any even remotely systematic philosophy of nature. The barrier which must inevitably prevent any systematic attempt to think of natural phenomena as governed by laws is the absence of a belief in creation ex nihilo. If the world does not owe its whole existence to God, then no divine law can provide the fundamental explanation of the nature of things. The idea of an utterly transcendent divine lawgiver creating the world ex nihilo was, and was felt to be, an alien intrusion into Greek thought from outside, first from Judaism, later from Christianity. This idea was eventually to be of great importance in the emergence of modern natural science, but initially it had surprisingly little effect even on the philosophy of those who accepted it. The writers of the Old Testament had no interest in (or indeed conception of) a science of nature of any kind, and their outlook was shared by the writers of the New Testament and the earlier Church Fathers. The first Greek author to speak with any frequency of laws of nature was Philo Judaeus (62). Philo was concerned however more with morality and religion than with the natural world; his attitude to the latter owes much to contemporary Platonism, for which he is one of our main sources. The later Church Fathers also found Platonism the most congenial of the pagan philosophies, for the reasons summed up with admirable lucidity by Augustine in Book VIII of De Civitate Dei: the Platonists conceived of God as an immaterial, self-existent being outside time and space, on whom the world wholly depends but who is entirely independent of the world; and they saw as the chief end of man the love and imitation of God. Despite his Platonism, there are voluntaristic elements in Augus(59) Ibid. 398bi7-23. (60) Astronomica, i.479. (61) Metamorphoses, xv. 71. (62) On Philo see Helmut KOESTER, Nomos PhuseSs: the concept of natural law in Greek thought, in Jacob NEUSNER (ed.), Religions in Antiquity: essays in memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (Leyden 1968), pp. 530-540.

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tine's thought. (One of his statements, Creatoris voluntas rerum necessitas est (63), could stand as an epigram for the entire movement). On the whole, however, these voluntaristic remarks and his occasional references to laws of nature (64) occur in places where Augustine was thinking primarily as a theologian, not as a philosopher. The philosophical world in which he moved was that of the Neoplatonists, and every kind of Platonism places the ultimate explanation of things not in the will of a creator but in the intelligible relations of the Ideas, conceived by Augustine (as by all contemporary Platonists) to be the thoughts of God. This tension between a theology which emphasized the freecreative will of God and a philosophy in which explanations were ultimately grounded on the intrinsic necessity of the Ideas was never adequately resolved by Augustine. Christian and Pagan alike were turning away from the sensible to the intelligible world. The intellectual energy that would have been needed to create a new philosophy of nature had not vanished but was being employed elsewhere. John Philoponus tried, but even one remarkable man can effect little by himself against the intellectual current of his age. Nominalism was very far from being unknown in the ancient world. Indeed most of the Hellenistic philosophical schools (and their immediate precursors) explicitly or implicitly denied the existence of universals. Antisthenes' worries about the possibility of definition and predication, reported by Aristotle, can be most intelligibly explained by the supposition that he admitted the existence only of individuals (65), and the same philosophy is presumably the background of his remark to Plato: 'I see the horse, but not the horseness' (66). A similar dictum is also attributed to Diogenes the Cynic (67). Antisthenes' doubts about the possibility of predication were repeated by Stilpo of Megara, probably for the same reason (68). There was also no room for universals in the materialistic physics of the Stoics, and Zeno held that the Platonic Ideas should be thought of purely as mental images (69). Chrysippus and others attempted to frame a semantic theory which would suppose the existence of immaterial lekta (literally, things said), but which would not require
(63) De Genesi ad Litteram, vi. 15. Quoted by CALVIN, Insitutes, III. xxiii. 8. A less epigrammatic version appears in De Civitate Dei, xxi. 8. (64) De Civitate Dei, xv.12, xxi.8 (twice). (65) Metaphysics, 102^132-34, 104302528; Topics, 104D2/.
(66) ANTISTHENES, Fr. 50 (Antisthenis

Fragmenta, edited F. D. CAIZZI (Milan 1966)). (67) DIOGENES LAERTIUS, The Lives of the Philosophers, vi. 53. (68) PLUTARCH, Adversus Colotem, 1119C1120B. (69) SVF, I.65, 494.

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reference to any entities in the world other than purely material individuals. This lekton theory, whatever its merits or demerits, is irrelevant to the study of nature. One of the cardinal principles of Stoic physics is that only bodies are capable of acting or being acted upon (70). Epicurus must also be classified as a nominalist. He was not inclined by temperament to discuss the views of his predecessors, and those letters and fragments which have come down to us contain no explicit discussion of the universals of Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless it is quite clear that there is no place for universals in a system in which only atoms and the void in which they move are allowed to exist. Most of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy therefore rejected the realistic metaphysics underlying the Aristotelian theory of demonstration and the related conceptions of form and essence. Nevertheless the idea of a natural science directed towards discovering laws of nature did not arise to take its place, as it did when Aristotelian philosophy was again discarded in the seventeenth century. One reason for this is that none of these Hellenistic schools was interested in research for its own sake, as Aristotle had been and as his successors in the Lyceum (notably Strato) still were. Needham's description of the Epicureans as the most scientific of all the schools of antiquity (71) could scarcely be more mistaken. Epicurus' system was naturalistic, not scientific. His approach was wholly and intensely dogmatic, and this dogmatism, coupled with a lack of desire to advance beyond the Founder, remained a uniform characteristic of the school (72). The study of nature was undertaken by Epicurus in order to provide a defence against the myths and bogies of traditional religion; it was neither disinterested research nor (as for most scientists in the seventeenth century) an exploration of the works of God. In the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century there are two distinct levels of explanation: the (internal) structure of bodies and the laws of motion (and, after Newton, of forces also). The ancient atomists also aimed at explaining the macroscopic properties of bodies in terms of the arrangement of their component atoms. It can therefore seem to us quite a small step to move on to enquiring after the laws governing the motions of these parts. Since Descartes it seems natural to pay particular attention to collision
(70) (71) (72) follow SVF, I.90, II.387. NEEDHAM, op. cit. p. 536. Epicurus's followers took an oath to his teachings, and Epicurus (alone) was called the Leader (hSgemon), J. M. RIST, Epicurus: an introduction (Cambridge 1972), p. 9.

JOHN R. MILTON

phenomena and to ask what law connects the velocities of the colliding bodies before and after impact. It would be a mistake to suppose that the step would have been small in Antiquity. Epicurus was quite uninterested in a quantitative discussion of physical problems, and in this instance he lacked the concept of inertial motion necessary if the problem is even to be clearly stated. Moreover nothing would have led Epicurus to admit divine government of the world, and any physical concept which even involved a hint of such government would have been left unused, whatever its potential usefulness in research. In contrast to the Epicureans, the Stoics felt no hostility towards the idea of divine providenceindeed quite the contrary. God was not however conceived as a transcendent creator ruling by law, but rather as an all-pervading material pneuma. The world as a whole is animate and even intelligent because of this divine element pervading every part of it. This active divine element is related to the passive matter of the world in the way that the human soul is related to the body, and it no more controls the world by laws than we do our bodies (73). The Stoics had a profound influence, through Cicero, on the juridical idea of Natural Law but very little on the idea of physical laws of nature. The Stoics, the Epicureans and the other nominalist schools gradually lost ground in the first few centuries of the Christian era, first to the Middle Platonists, then to the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his successors. The voluntaristic element in Christianity was pushed to some extent into the background by the Platonic modes of thought current among the more philosophically sophisticated of the Church Fathers. Nominalism reappeared in the West with the revival of philosophy in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, but the philosophers involved were concerned with logic and semantics, not with natural philosophy. The subsequent reception of almost the entire body of Aristotle's writings made these earlier enquiries appear narrow and inadequate; they were largely forgotten, just as the later medieval writers were to be forgotten in their turn. It was not until the beginning of the fourteenth century that nominalist theories were again revived and combined with a thoroughly voluntarist interpretation of Christian theology. The synthesis of these two streams of thought helped to create a philosophy of nature which was to be characteristic not only of Ockham and his medieval successors, and of Calvin and others among the sixteenth-century
(73) CICERO, De Natura Deorum, ii. 23-39; DIOGENES LAERTIUS, The Lives of the Philosophers, vii. 134-157. 19O

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Reformers, but also of many of the scientists and philosophers of the seventeenth century. This is especially the case in England, where Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke and Newton (74) all show clear signs of the influence of nominalist or voluntarist ideas; it is also the case in France, where similar influences strongly affected the thought of Descartes (75), Gassendi (76) and Mersenne (77). Since the time of Duhem much work has been done on the science of the fourteenth century and its connection (or lack of connection) with the new inertial mechanics of Galileo and his successors. The philosophical innovations of the fourteenth century did influence the natural science of the period, and hence perhaps indirectly the science of the seventeenth century; nevertheless the major influence of Ockham and his successors was less on the content of the scientific ideas themselves than on the new metaphysics and philosophy of nature which they began and which was further developed by the advocates of the new mechanical philosophy. It was this philosophy of nature that provided a context within which the idea of a law of nature was both comprehensible and natural. Its main elements are as follows: /. There exists a very sharp and infinitely wide distinction between God and the created world. There is nothing divine about either the world as a whole or any part of it; divinity can be ascribed solely to its maker. This conception of the relation of God to the world is fundamentally in opposition both to any Neoplatonizing account of the origin of the material world by emanation from the divine substance, and to any Stoic or Platonic picture of the world as the body of a divine animal, of which God is the soul. Newton vigorously expressed his rejection of this unworthy conception of God:
This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator or Universal
(74) The influence of Henry More's theory of space should not mislead anyone into considering Newton as a Platonist. The following verdict by R. S. Westfall appears to me to be entirely accurate. 'Try as I may, I am unable to perceive a neoplatonic hierarchy in the natural philosophy of the mature Newton. I perceive instead a sharply dichotomized universe with God Pantocrator, on the one hand, and on the other, inert matter which is moved and activated only insofar as the omnipresent God acts immediately to move and activate it'. The changing World of the Newtonian Industry, Journal for the History of Ideas, XXXVII (1976), p. 179. (75) Descartes's extreme voluntarism appears most clearly in his correspondence, see especially the letters to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, 6 May 1630, 27 May 1630 and to Mesland a May 1644. (76) Olivier BLOCH, La philosophie de Gassendi (The Hague 1971), Chs. iv, v. (77) R. LENOBLE, Mersenne ou la naissance du mtcanisme (Paris 1943), esp. pp. 275-279, 321, 325.

JOHN R. MILTON Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants (78).

2. Everything which exists (and to which appeal in explanation can therefore legitimately be made) is an individual. Although we may continue to speak of forms, nevertheless in nature, according to Francis Bacon, nothing exists except individual bodies acting according to laws (79). In Boyle's words,
For, for aught I can clearly discern, whatsoever is performed in the merely material world, is really done by particular bodies acting according to the laws of motion, rest, etc., that are settled and maintained by God among things corporeal [...] (80).

3. The omnipotence of God, always an element of orthodox Christian theology, is given particular emphasis. Appeal was freely made to this doctrine (regarded, in general, as a truth of natural theology), not only by scholastic theologians but also by relatively untheologically-minded philosophers. Descartes's main argument against the existence of atoms relies wholly on the unlimited power of God: God could unquestionably make a particle too small for any creature to subdivide, but he could not deprive himself of the power of sub-dividing it further (81). In discussing the power of God the medieval nominalists made use of a distinction between his potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata (82). The meaning of these terms is largely self-explanatory. Anything that God can do at all lies within his absolute power; something lies within his ordained power if it can be done without breaking the laws he has freely chosen to establish. God's absolute power is not quite unlimited: he cannot sin or die (83), or make another God (84). Nevertheless with respect to his creation it is complete: God can suspend the causal powers of created things (85), give them unnatural properties (for example by making fire cold (86), and in general make any one real thing exist in the absence of any other (87).
(78) Isaac NEWTON, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. A. Motte, rev. F. Cajori (Berkeley i960), p. 455. (79) Novum Organum, ii. 2. (80) BOYLE, Works, vol. V, p. 218. (81) The Principles of Philosophy, ii. 20. (82) This distinction can be found in earlier writers (e.g. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I* q.25 a.sadi); Ockham was however the first philosopher to make extensive use 192 of it. (83) OCKHAM, Ordinatio, d.42 q.i, Opera Theologica, vol. IV, p. 610. (84) OCKHAM, Ordinatio, d.20 q.i, Opera Theologica, vol. IV, p. 36. (85) OCKHAM, Ordinatio, prologue q.8, Opera Theologica, vol. I, p. 221. (86) OCKHAM, Ordinatio, d.i q. 3, Opera Theologica, vol. I, p. 423. (87) OCKHAM, Ordinatio, prologue q.i, Opera Theologica vol. I, p. 38.

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A very similar account of God's power can be found in Boyle. The only limits to God's power are in connection with his own nature and with what is logically impossible. 'There are some notions or propositions, that are therefore impossible to be true, because they are repugnant. I say, not to the changes of the textures, or other modifications of things, but to their essential ideas, if so I may call them' (88). God was entirely free in his choice of the laws of nature and 'by with-holding his concourse, or changing these laws of motion, which depend perfectly upon his will, he may invalidate most, if not all the axioms of natural philosophy' (89). 4. God governs the world, not by means of intermediaries of any kind, but directly, by regulating the motion of every single body, however tiny and unimportant. In physics, God not only gives an impulse to matter at the beginning but also conserves this impulse by means of exactly the same action as that which first created it (90). Indeed, according to Descartes the difference between creation and conservation is nothing more than a difference of reason, made by our minds but not found in reality (91). Because God acts directly on matter everywhere, all the intermediaries proposed by the various schools of Greek philosophy and absorbed into the world-picture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance are to be discarded without exception. As Boyle put it, one must never think of God and Nature as two co-ordinate governors, like the two Roman consuls (92). The idea of Nature as a natura naturans or semi-deity needs to be rejected completely as encroaching on the sovereignty of God (93). 5. The distinctions between natural and artificial bodies and between natural and violent motion, both quite central in Aristotle's natural philosophy, lose their importance. The fundamental antithesis in Christian theology is not between violence and nature or art and nature, but between grace and nature. Miracles are allowed to be contrary to the laws of nature, but such exercises of God's absolute power are restricted to the order of grace. All movements which occur in the ordinary running of the world, whatever their character and direction, are fully natural because they take place in accordance with the laws of nature. The idea that there exists a fundamental difference between natural and artificial bodies, an idea central to Aristotle's philosophy, is therefore abandoned. The
(88) BOYLE, Works, vol. VI, p. 677.
(89) BOYLE, Works, vol. IV, p. 161.

(91) Meditations, iii, (Euvres, Vol. VII,

p. 49.

(90) DESCARTES, The Principles of Philosophy, ii.36, 4Z.

(92) BOYLE, Works, vol. V, p. 185. (93) Ibid. pp. 167, 169.

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modern distinction between natural and synthetic substances is a distinction of origin, not of nature. The older distinction could not be retained in a world in which all things were at the same time artificial, because they had been made by God, and natural, because they were governed by the laws of nature. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne could savour a view that was becoming the new orthodoxy, but which still retained an air of paradox: 'All things are artificial, for Nature is the Art of God' (94). 6. Finally, and in some ways most importantly of all, there is a belief in the radical contingency of the world, and hence of the laws of nature also. Outside astronomy the most remarkable achievements of the Greeks in the physical sciences had been in disciplines such as statics and hydrostatics, in which apparently self-evident and necessary axioms could be found which would serve as premises for subsequent deduction. To think of such axioms as laws would have been quite unnatural, and no-one did so. A 'science' whose first premises were not self-evident and incapable of proof would not, for Aristotle, have been a science at all (95). Laws of nature freely established by God could not have this necessary character. Our world is only one of many possible; its laws are contingent and can be discovered, not by reasoning but only by experimental enquiry. Newton's disciple Roger Cotes was guided by this tradition when he made his severe judgement on those who, like Leibniz, supposed that they could discover a priori the laws of nature:
Without all doubt this world, so diversified with that variety of forms and motions we find in it, could arise from nothing but the perfectly free will of God directing and presiding over all. From this fountain it is that those laws, which we call the laws of Nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces indeed of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experiments. He who is presumptuous enough to think that he can find the true principles of physics and the laws of natural things by the force alone of his own mind, and the internal light of his reason, must either suppose that the world exists by necessity, and by the same necessity follows the laws proposed; or if the order of Nature was established by the will of God, that himself, a miserable reptile, can tell what was fittest to be done (96).

It is perhaps the acknowledged contingency of its ultimate principles which, more than anything else, separates the science of Newton from the science of Archimedes.
(94) Sir Thomas BROWNE, Religio Medici, j.16. (95) Posterior Analytics, 7465-13, 83D328436. (96) Roger COTES, Preface to the 2nd edition of Newton's Principia, trans. A. Motte, rev. F. Cajori (Berkeley 1960), p. xxxii.

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LAWS OF NATURE

IV Once the idea of laws of nature had become generally accepted, it was possible (for those who so wished) to reject the theological standpoint which had originally made the idea acceptable. The attempt to do this began quite early: already in the 1680s Boyle found it necessary to argue that it is only possible for a world to be governed by laws if God is constantly active within it (97). Inanimate bodies cannot understand laws and hence cannot by themselves follow them. Bodies can move and transfer their motion to other bodies only because God continuously guides and regulates their movements. A lawgoverned world superintended by God is possible, as is a chaos; a law-governed world in which God does not act (either because he does not exist or for some other reason) cannot coherently be supposed to exist. Boyle's works continued to be widely read in the century after his death, but this particular argument failed to secure any general acceptance. The same was true of the similar though more complex and ambitious arguments put forward by Malebranche and by Berkeley. By the middle of the eighteenth century, if not before, the concept of a physical law of nature had become one of those most basic of all concepts, which apparently require no metaphysical justification for their use and which are therefore employed with complete confidence. The idea of laws of nature could now appear to be natural; the slow changes of thought that had led to its genesis could be forgotten.

(97) A Free Inquiry into the Commonly received Notion of Nature, section ii, Works, vol. V, esp. p. 170.

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