The preacher asks, “Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?” He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the law of gravitation.  He asks whether some day certain “royal and ultimate laws” may not come and “wreck” those laws which are at present, it would appear, acting as nature’s police.  It is evident, from these expressions, that “laws,” in the mind of the preacher, are entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy.  And it would appear that the “royal laws” are by no means to be regarded as constitutional royalties:  at any moment, they may, like Eastern despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws, which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world’s work, and, to use phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning—­“make hay” of their belongings.  Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested this singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may “suspend” low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate.

Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold them.  All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of “laws” has nothing to do with modern science.  It is scholastic realism—­realism as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena a thousand years ago.  The essence of such realism is that it maintains the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays, general propositions.  It affirms, for example, that “man” is a real thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in the sensible, but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know.  Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific thought, it really pervades ordinary language.  There are few people who would, at once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example, exists apart from the mind which conceives the idea of colour.  They hold it to be something which resides in the coloured object; and so far they are as much Realists as if they had sat at Plato’s feet.  Reflection on the facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that “colour” is—­not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position—­but a name for that group of states of feeling which we call blue, red, yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by luminiferous vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to colour; while these again are set afoot by states of the body to which we ascribe colour, but which are equally devoid of likeness to colour.

In the same way, a law of nature, in the scientific sense, is the product of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than colour has.  The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in fact, move towards one another.  But the other facts of observation,