DEFINITIONS OF TERMS 171

the act of being translated from the social to the metaphysical plane, to
become polarized into two apparently antithetical concepts. For minds
in whose mental vision the personality of the human legislator, judge,
and administrator looms larger than the law of which he is at once the
master and the servant, the metaphysical 'law' governing the Universe is
the law of a unique and omnipotent God pictured in the image of a
human Caesar.1 For other minds, in whose vision Caesar's figure is
eclipsed by a human law that is impersonally formulated, applied,' ad-
ministered, and enforced—such as 'the Law of the Medes and Persians
which altereth not',2 that was the oecumenical law of the Achaemenian
Empire—the metaphysical law' governing the Universe is the law of a
uniform and inexorable Nature. In this diffracted vision, metaphysical
'law* in the guise of 'a Law of God* and metaphysical 'law' in the guise of
'laws of Nature* present between them the double-faced countenance of
a Janus, and in either face there are—as in the human law of every-day life
—both consoling and horrifying features.

The horrifying feature in 'the laws of Nature' is their inexorability;
for, although, in theory, these 'laws' may be scheduled as being dejure
mere 'by-laws' or 'secondary causes' subject to the fiat of a 'First Cause'
that will then be identified with God, in practice they will be taken as
being de facto autonomous. 'The laws of Nature', in fact, fulfil the Medes'
and Persians' ideal of laws that cannot ever be repealed or ever even be
revised in the light of experience.3 This inhuman quality of inexorability
is horrifying indeed, yet its moral enormity carries with it an intellectual
compensation; for laws in which there 'is no variableness, neither shadow
of turning',4 will on that very account be ascertainable, both exactly and
definitively, by a human intelligence; and, while no more than isolated
fragments of these 'laws of Nature' may be thus ascertainable at any
particular time and place by any particular human mind, their intrinsic
stability and permanence render them accessible to a process of progres-
sive exploration by a Collective Human Intellect.5 A knowledge of
Nature thus appears to be within Man's mental grasp, and there is a
sense in which this knowledge is power; for human beings who know
Nature's unvarying laws and who can therefore predict with certainty
which way she is going to jump will not only be able to dodge this in-
human monster's aimless blows; they will also be able to harness the
energy generated, released, and expended in these undesigned opera-
tions, and so to turn this energy to account for serving human purposes
(in so far, of course, as individual human wills can agree on what their
common purposes shall be). And thus a Collective Human Intellect,
which cannot divert the inexorable course of Nature by a hair's breadth,
can nevertheless make a world of difference, for good or for evil, to the
effect of the play of laws of Nature on human affairs by bringing into
action technological devices that can effectively control, not the opera-
tion of these laws, but the incidence of their operation on Man's life.

* See V. vi. 33-36. 2 Dan. vi. 8 and 12.

3 'Biological progress exists as a fact of Nature external to Man' (Julian Huxley, in his
'Conclusion' to T.H. and J. Huxley: Evolution and Ethics, 1893-1943 (London 194?,
Pilot Press), p. i8a). , ,

4 Jas. i. 17, s See pp. 697 and 701, below.