Note q — Chapter II

The general reader may reasonably feel a difficulty in assigning their proper meaning to terms used in senses so technical. He may possibly be assisted by looking over the field of view thus:—A Force is visible to us as a movement in Nature;—when we try to formulate it intelligently to ourselves, its mental equivalent is Law. If, then, we wish to describe an intelligent præ-conception of Law (such as distinctly involves the Foresight of its operation) we call the Law a Creative Idea, or (less definitely) a Design. Tracing the chain of causation in the reverse or downward direction, the Idea when put in movement appears to our mind's eye as Law; and when we wish to include its actual working upon the realm of Nature we term it a Force.

Both James Mill and his son (a truly affectionate annotator), are careful to point out that the essence of moral causation involves Intention—that is (as Mr. Mill explains), Foresight, or expectation of consequences.—"Analysis of the Human Mind," II., 400, 401.

It should be observed that in many branches of Natural Science the word Law is so employed as to include the conception of Force. Law is in this usage not merely a logical formula expressive of realized facts, but it involves the idea of the coercion or impellent motion which brought those facts into being. "Thus, then," says Dr. Carpenter, "whilst no Law, which is simply a generalisation of phenomena, can be considered as having any coercive action, we may assign that value to Laws which express the universal conditions of the action of a Force, the existence of which we learn from the testimony of our own consciousness." He had before remarked that "it is the substitution of the Dynamical for the mere Phenomenal idea, which gives their highest value to our conceptions of the Order of Nature."—Address to British Association at Brighton, August, 1872. This Order of Nature, as the learned President says in conclusion, is no "sufficient account of its Cause."