He thought the
archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we
rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his
mind in its very literal intention.
But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained
ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.
The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is
no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all
the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to
the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but
that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their
great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They
are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone
calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages,
as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many
dialects.
Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific
logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,
Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students
will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of
additional names.
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