ABSTRACT
Science, in seeking to discover order in nature, would appear to assume that there is such a thing. Most people are far more familiar with the legal or moral use of the word “law” than with its scientific use, hence a certain amount of confusion. All scientific methods start from observed facts, and usually end in generalizations of some kind concerning whole classes of facts, or events, or, at the very least, concerning large groups of them. The complete absence of natural laws, or what comes to the same thing, the complete absence of order in nature would, therefore, show itself in an absence of exclusions of any conceivable combination of attributes or events. The number of phenomena actually observed is usually a small one, in comparison with the whole class or group, of which the results of the application of the methods are held to be true more or less.
