ABSTRACT
The whole order of things in any system, whether in nature as a whole, or in any part of it, really consists of a system of inter-connected laws, which constitute as it were the threads of its orderly pattern. 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. Many laws have been discovered which, if true, would definitely exclude various conceivable combinations, the absence of which they may be said to account for. And a considerable amount of experience has so far confirmed these laws. Natural laws, in short, are not man-made, but only man-discovered and man-formulated. More important is the distinction between laws of co-existence and laws of sequence. There is a law of co-existence, whenever a number of attributes or states are regularly together.
