iii. Human Nature means, sometimes the ordinary, sometimes the orderly, course of human things.
Even as to non-human Nature we sometimes find a popular tendency to call, or think “unnatural,” some phenomena which strike us as being contrary to the general order and beneficence of things: and hence we are less fond of saying that Nature prompts the cat to torture the mouse or the moth to fly into the flame, than that she implants in the animal race the parental instinct to protect the young. I confess I sympathize with this tendency, and with all those who in their hearts look upon death and pain as being contrary to the ideal order of things and ultimately destined to be destroyed. But for the present, apart from sentiment, let us simply note the fact that in our popular language we sometimes say that it is the nature of a clock to indicate the right time, but sometimes that it is its nature to deviate from the right time: whence we deduce the conclusion that:—
iv. The Nature of a thing means sometimes its object, sometimes its custom.
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.
Suspension of Laws of Nature
Does human Will ever suspend a Law of Nature?
I am standing, we will suppose, under a tree in autumn. If a leaf flutters down and rests upon my head, the Law of gravitation is no more suspended by my Will, than if it rests upon some intercepting bough. The result of the Law is modified; downward motion is replaced by downward pressure: but the Law itself is not suspended.