The evolution of general ideas

by Th. Ribot

On the other, if there is evolution in nature, there must also be evolution in our ideas, and the pretension to laws or types that are fixed unalterably, becomes chimerical. There is no longer the sharp distinction, as formerly admitted, between “essential” and “accidental,” i. e., permanent and variable characters. The Primary epoch of our globe may have obeyed laws which no longer hold for our Quaternary age: all changes in the course of development. We shall return to this point in the concluding section.

Without insisting further upon a debate that is of secondary interest for the psychologist, we may remark that three principal periods can be distinguished in the development of the Concept of Law: viz., the periods of generic images, of concrete or empirical laws, and of theoretical or ideal laws.

It is useless to study the first phase in detail, since it interests us only as an embryonic form, a germ, or essay. It consists in the mechanical conception of regularity for a very restricted number of events. Resulting from the constant or frequent repetition of certain cycles (the course of the sun, moon, seasons, etc.) it is organised in the mind by a process of semi-passive assimilation, that of generic images. Many men have had, and still have, only this shadow, this simulacrum of law, resting upon pure association, upon practical habit, upon the unreflecting expectation of an often-perceived recurrence. Humble as it is, this notion was nevertheless useful in the education of humanity, for it checked the exuberant tendency of the imagination to people the world with capricious causes, obedient to no law. It prevented the establishment of a rule of universal contingency; it was the first affirmation of a faith in regular order. The progress of reflexion, and methodical research, have done the rest.

We owe to Wundt (Philosophische Studien, 1886, III., p. 195 et seq.) an observation of great interest to any one concerned in the development of the idea of law. To-day this word is current in all the sciences; indeed its most rigorous acceptance is in mathematics and chemical physics. This was not always the case. In antiquity, the word was employed almost exclusively in a social, juristic, moral sense. The concept of natural law, regarded as a sort of order, a police-force, was only very slowly formed and established. Copernicus and Kepler employed the word “hypothesis.” Galileo calls the fundamental laws of nature “axioms,” and those derived from them “theorems,” following the terminology of the mathematicians. Descartes begins his Philosophy of Nature by laying down certain Regulæ sive leges naturales. Newton says: Axiomata sive leges motus. The extension of the word law is due apparently to the need of establishing a clear distinction between the purely abstract axioms of mathematics, and the principles to which we attribute an objective value, an existence in nature. Montesquieu’s celebrated definition, “Laws are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things,” exhibits this concept in its highest degree of generalisation. We may note, in passing, that in the enquiry referred to above ([ch. IV.]), nearly all the answers indicate that images of the social juristic order were evoked, although the scientific acceptance of the word was perfectly familiar to a large number of the subjects: showing that the primitive signification preponderates in the vulgar conscience.

In another article, entitled Wer ist der Gesetzgeber der Naturgesetze? (loc. cit., pp. 493 et seq.), the same author maintains an opinion, which, notwithstanding its paradoxical appearance, seems to me perfectly valid. Descartes called the laws of nature “rules,” inasmuch as they explain phenomena to us; “laws,” inasmuch as God constituted them ab initio as properties of matter. At a later period, nature takes the place of God, which is still the survival of a pantheistic conception of the world. Still later, the preponderating tendency is to call laws by the names of their inventors: Mariotte, Gay-Lussac, Dulong and Petit, Avogadro, Ohm, Weber, etc. “In the seventeenth century it was God who established the laws of nature; in the eighteenth it was Nature herself; in the nineteenth it is the affair of the scientists.” This thesis agrees with what was said above, of the approximate character of laws, of the mixture of objective and subjective elements that obtain in their formulæ, and it is no paradox to assert that the state of mind of a Mariotte, a Gay-Lussac, a Weber, etc., when they discover their law, represents this approximation at a given moment.

I. Empirical laws correspond, broadly speaking, with the intermediate forms of abstraction and of generalisation. They consist in the reduction of a large number of facts to a single formula, but without any rational explanation. In the course of events we discover a constant relation of co-existence or of succession between two or several facts; we mentally detach this regular relation from the total which includes it, and extend it to other cases. Constancy is not even necessary for empirical laws, frequency suffices: at least one often has to be content with it. These laws abound in the half-sciences, and in embryo science: they are useful, they give order and simplification.

Their first characteristic is that they are identical with fact. Laws and facts are only two aspects of the same thing. To pass from facts to their empirical law, is merely replacing simple and homogeneous cognition by abstraction, multiple and heterogeneous cognition by perception. Hence the empirical law is rightly compared to a general fact, and it is legitimate in psychology to say the law of association or the general fact of association. On the other hand (in virtue of the natural tendency to anthropomorphism) vulgarisms such as “laws govern facts,” and the like, encourage in many minds the illusion of an ideal world of law superposed upon the world of facts, external to experience, and acting upon it like a government.

A second characteristic, which though frequent is not universal, is complexity. Necessarily objective, since it is a simple notation of observed facts, the empirical law does not always succeed in embracing the results of abstraction in one short and simple formula. Sometimes it does so; sometimes it is confronted with a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to a single proportion; in many cases it has to distribute itself, and resignedly to employ a long formula. Ex.: in physiology, Pflüger’s law (or the laws of reflexes), in linguistics, the laws of Grimm, etc. Here there is a summary description, reduced to the principal facts. It often has to cover a great number of details, as in Listing’s law (of the rotation of the ocular globe). Plenty of examples are to be found in the sciences that are in process of formation, and ill-constituted: psychology,[128] ethics, sociology, etc. Empirical law could only be further simplified by changing its nature, namely by transforming it into theoretical law.

Empirical law is thus the type of law that is immanent, contained in the facts, invoking their representation directly and indirectly by means of intermediate abstraction, involving ascending degrees of abstraction, that, at their highest level, bring it insensibly very near to ideal law.

II. Theoretical, or ideal, law corresponds with the higher forms of abstraction. It exhibits increasingly approximative constructions of the mind, in proportion as these ascend, and are farther removed from experience. Empirical laws are the material whence they are derived, and the transformation is accomplished at the moment, and in the degree, in which description gives place to explanation. To minds accustomed to the discipline of the strict sciences, this conception of law alone is valid, and they are prone to treat with disdain or defiance the formulæ that are a simple summing-up of the results of experience, judging them unworthy of the name of laws. To the psychologist, the position is quite other: empirical concept and theoretical concept are two forms, two aspects of the same intellectual process: there is no constitutional difference between them. Nevertheless, in its higher form, the concept of law has its proper and special characteristics which must be noted.