Editorial June 12, 1920 Issue

Law and Its Counterfeit

Frederick Dixon

Law, scientifically understood, is that in which no variation is possible. The moment any variation is perceived, that which has hitherto been regarded as law passes into the limbo of supposititious law and ceases to be of interest in Science, except as some stage in an experimental investigation. It was by a neglect of so simple a definition as this that Hume laid himself open to being unhorsed by the lance of Huxley. Hume had defined the miracle as a violation of a law of nature,—a thing impossible, as Huxley was prompt to point out. A violated law, ipso facto, never was a law at all. Thus, as Huxley showed, either the miracles were the proof of unsuspected law, or else the Maker of the universe was involved in the impossible, that is to say, in the violation of His own law. This, surely, is why Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 134 of Science and Health, "The true Logos is demonstrably Christian Science, the natural law of harmony which overcomes discord,—not because this Science is supernatural or preternatural, nor because it is an infraction of divine law, but because it is the immutable law of God, good."

The operation, then, of law is perceptible throughout even the material creation. If it were not for the existence of absolute spiritual law, the counterfeit of law in physical nature could not have been conceived. Consequently, as the so-called physical law can be and is perpetually being proved to be lawless, it is obvious that it is the existence of true law which alone protects the physical counterfeit from immediate destruction. In other words, it is only the fact that physical law counterfeits the spiritual that made it possible for the writer of Job to demand, "Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" The human mind, in other words, intensely lawless in itself, finds it necessary to counterfeit true law sufficiently closely to prevent the immediate destruction of its own counterfeit.

This being so, it becomes at once evident why natural science has kept changing with the advancing centuries. As the human mind has been more and more riddled by Truth, it has found it necessary to change its own law, thus proving it never to have been law, and to shift its scientific standpoint, thus showing that standpoint to have been always unscientific. Between natural science, as expounded by Aristotle, and natural science, as taught to-day, there is a great gulf fixed; but this gulf is really in the nature of a mirage, the laws of this supposititious natural science having been altered solely because of the exposure of their lawlessness, the human mind being necessarily unable to shift its basis from a material and suppositional to a spiritual and actual basis. "Mortal mind," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 86 of Science and Health, "sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees." The profundity of that statement has not yet been grasped by the world. Once upon a time humanity saw the world as flat, and, believing it to be flat, naturally never sailed round it. Then came the era of the circumnavigator, when the human mind, believing the world to be round, sailed round it, proving it to be round. But inasmuch as the world is only a mental concept, externalizing human thought, it was just as possible for the geographers of patristic theology to proclaim a flat earth, with the sky stretched from the summits of the mountains circling it, as it was for the later geographers to model the world as a sphere, and for the circumnavigators to sail round it.

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