Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE. 460
the essential distinction between its literal and its mefcaplhorical
acceptations, he might have at once cleared up the mystery.
After telling us that "1laws, in their most extensive signification, are the necessary relations (les rapports nizcessaires) which
arise from the nature of things, and that, in this sense, all
beings have their laws; —that the Deity has his laws; the
material world its laws; intelligences superior to man their
laws; the brutes their laws; man his laws;" he proceeds to
remark, " That the moral world is far from being so well governed as the material; for the former, although it has its laws,
which are invariable, does not observe these laws so constantly
as the latter." It is evident that this remark derives whatever
plausibility it possesses from a play upon words; from confounding moral laws with physical; or, in plainer terms, from confounding laws which are addressed by a legislator to intelligent
beings, with those general conclusions concerlning the established
order of the universe, to which, when legitimately inferred from
an induction sufficiently extensive, philosophers have metaphorically applied the title of Laws of N-ature. In the one case,
the conformity of the law with the nature of things does not
at all depend on its being observed or not, but on the reasonableness and moral obligation of the law. In the other case, the
very definition of the word laiw supposes that it applies universally; insomuch that, if it failed in one single instance, it
would cease to be a law. It is, therefore, a mere quibble to say,
that the laws of the material world are better observed than
those of the moral; the meaning of the word law, in the two
cases to which it is here applied, being so totally different, as to
render the comparison or contrast, in the statement of which it
is involved, altogether illusory and sophistical. Indeed, nothing
more is necessary to strip the proposition of every semblance
of plausibility, but an attention to this verbal ambiguity.
This metaphorical employment of the word law, to express a
general fact, although it does not appear to have been adopted
in the technical phraseology of ancient philosophy, is not unusual among the classical writers, when speaking of those phys.