Much has been written and said as to the fixity of natural law; meaning by natural law the supposed law of the so-called physical universe. Has any one ever defined such a natural law? Is there any comprehensive statement of a great law which rules all physical phenomena? In place of this, we find a multitude of so-called laws; indeed, it may be said that the discovery of new laws is quite as much the aim of the physicist as is his application of those already believed in.
Moreover, these laws are often in opposition to one another; no statement can be made that will be the fact in all cases; the law ceases to be a law unless certain conditions are excluded. The most that can be said is, that under certain circumstances certain phenomena may be expected; yet while volumes have been written in support of some special theory, supposed to represent the working of a special law under given circumstances, the special theory has been proved incorrect again and again and the learned volumes have become waste paper. The asserted law of material phenomena is not a law; it is nothing but a mass of empirical statements, all of them confessedly based upon fragmentary data and subject to perpetual revision. There is no unity in such a system; no great fundamental principle which will explain material phenomena, and no rule or statement regarding such phenomena by which they may be tested.
Men are beginning to accept the contention that it is impossible for the human mind—"the fleshly mind," as St. Paul has it; "mortal mind," as Mrs. Eddy calls it—to cognize ultimate reality; that material phenomena are indeed nothing but the human mind made manifest to itself according to laws of its own making, as whimsical and illusive as the circumstances of a dream; in other words, the human mind evolves from itself and for itself the phenomena that it attempts to investigate, and is therefore merely playing with its own phantoms; bereft of any criterion and lost in the maze of its own hallucinations. Yet, with all this increasing sense of the unreliability of all statements based upon material phenomena, there is a demand, steadily becoming more insistent, for a stable criterion whereby all theories may be tested, and that the test be crucial. Admittedly, such a criterion is not to be found in the material consciousness; it must therefore be found in the spiritual. A perfect criterion must be based upon a perfect Principle, and perfection can be found nowhere save in God, Spirit. In the last analysis, the search for a perfect criterion narrows—or expands—to the question of the existence, nature, and revelation of God.
