Note 140 — Chapter III · THE MEANING OF LAW

Compare with the argument of this chapter, Royce, “Nature, Consciousness, and Self-consciousness,” in Studies of Good and Evil; and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer in International Journal of Ethics, October 1902. The inveterate prejudice that “laws of nature,” to be of scientific use, must be rigidly exact uniformities is so strong, that it may be worth while, even after the preceding discussion of general principles, to assist the reader by reminding him of the elementary fact that the most familiar quantities involved in our scientific formulæ (π, e, the vast majority of second and third roots, of logarithms of the natural numbers, of circular functions of angles, etc.) are incapable of exact evaluation. This of itself renders a scientific law, in the form in which it can be applied to the determination of actual occurrences, merely approximate, and thus shows that exact uniformity is unnecessary for the practical objects of the empirical sciences.