ABSTRACT
In fact it is not until the ‘opuscule’ of November 1825, ‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and Savants’, which opens dramatically with a third full statement of the law, that he explores some of its implications, and even here he left his arguments at a fairly elementary level of elaboration. In 1825 (November-December) he presented his law as follows:
Man began by conceiving phenomena of all kinds as due to the direct and continuous influence of supernatural agents; he next considered them as produced by different abstract forces residing in matter, but distinct and heterogeneous; finally, he limited himself to considering them as subject to a certain number of invariable natural laws.
