Laws of Nature
Many of those unbroken sequences of phenomena around us, which have been most frequently observed, have been made the subject of the Imagination and have received an imaginative name. When we find Nature, upon an invariable system, dealing out rewards for one course of action and penalties for another, there is suggested to us the thought of a great Lawgiver laying down laws and affixing rewards for obeying, and penalties for disobeying. Hence the sequences of natural phenomena have been called “Laws of Nature.”
Every action of every moment of our lives is performed for the most part in the instinctive and unconscious confidence that Nature will not deceive us by breaking her Laws: and hence they might, from another point of view, be called “Promises of Nature,” or “Expressions of the Will of Nature;” but “Law of Nature” has been selected—not perhaps altogether happily—as suggesting something more fixed and definite than even the Promises or Will of the Maker of the world.
Law of Nature is a metaphorical name for a frequently observed sequence of phenomena (apart from human Will), implying; to some minds, regularity; to others, absolute invariability.