One of the questions which I find I get myself most deeply involved in in all sorts of discussions is the problem of natural law. It’s interesting, you know, that, when we first began to study Eastern philosophy during the nineteenth century, that the Western interpreters and translators of the texts of Hinduism and Buddhism projected into these texts very many ideas that were then current in the Western philosophy of science, and, in particular, the idea of the existence (in some objective sense) of immutable laws of nature.

Probably some of you know that poem which Sir Edwin Arnold wrote called The Light of Asia, which was a kind of epic about the life and the doctrine of the Buddha. It contains at one point a whole section of quatrains in which the Buddha is represented as teaching the existence of an immutable natural law as a sort of ultimate reality. And the words which Sir Edwin Arnold puts into his mouth are:

Before beginning and without an end,

As space eternal and as surety sure,

Is fixed a Power divine that moves to good,

Only its laws endure….

It will not be contemned of any one;

Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains;

The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss,

The hidden ill with pains.

By this the slayer’s knife did stab himself;

The unjust judge hath lost his own defender;

The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief

And spoiler rob, to render.

And the whole section ends:

Such is the Law which moves to righteousness,

Which none at last may turn aside or stay;

The heart of it is Love, the end of it

Is Peace and Consummation sweet. Obey!

And this is really quite a fantastic projection onto the Hindu-Buddhist idea of karma, of the Western conception of natural law, or in particular the law of cause and effect. Because, strictly speaking, there is no idea in Hindu-Indian philosophy as a whole which quite corresponds to our notion of law. One of the words in Sanskrit which is frequently translated law is dharma. And so the dharma—a name sometimes given to the teaching of the Buddha—is sometimes therefore translated the law of Buddha.

And I find this is a completely erroneous concept not only in relation to Indian thought, but also, as Joseph Needham has shown so skillfully, in relation to Chinese thought. In the second volume of his Science and Civilization in China he concludes with a marvelous essay on human and natural law, showing that the principal Chinese terms which have hitherto been translated “law” or “law of nature” simply do not bear this connotation at all. And this of course includes the Chinese word which is always used as the equivalent of the Sanskrit dharma, the word fa. And this particular word is incidentally translated in various ways according to its contexts, but most usually as “doctrine” or as “method,” and sometimes perhaps as “function.” But “law” won’t do it all. And law also won’t do for what seem to be contemporary Western scientific conceptions of the regularities and orders of the natural world.

Let’s look for a moment at the history of the idea of a law of nature. It’s a very complicated history because it has connections not only with the legal conceptions of the Hebrews coming down in Christianity, but it also has a great deal to do with the history of Roman law, and a great deal of the Roman philosophy of law was incorporated into Christianity by the Latin church father, Tertullian, who was a lawyer. And, in a way, Tertullian must be held responsible for a great deal of the legal emphasis of Roman Catholic theology, where the relationships between God and man are spelled out in a very juridical way. Almost sometimes one feels on a principle of: if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Or in the Latin terms do ut des: “I give, that you may give.” I think that’s the proper translation.

Now, what has happened more or less is this: that when we begin with a conception of the world in which the creator and origin of the universe is regarded by analogy with a terrestrial king or with a terrestrial craftsman or architect, there is a conception that the creator has in mind a plan like an architect’s plan of a house, or a code like the code of laws laid down by such an Oriental potentate as Hammurabi, and that the universe follows this code. It follows a pre-ordained pattern. And that, therefore, the man who would explain the universe in any way has before him the task of discovering the pattern or the code of laws upon which its operation is fundamentally based. So the inquiry into the will of God, the inquiry into the laws of God, becomes the method of understanding the mysteries of nature.

Well now, as everybody recognizes in the course of time in the development of Western thought, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea began to become very strong that all the operations of nature were regular in a rather mechanical way. There were fixed causal connections between things such that, if you knew all the causes in a given sequence of cause and effect, you could invariably predict the effect, and that events were, in other words, linked with each other in such a way that they operated with the precision of a machine, and that therefore there seemed to be no room for miracles or for the interference of an arbitrary God in the course of the unfoldment of natural happenings.

And this attitude began to change the philosophy of some thoughtful Christians from theism to deism. Now, a theist—a believer in God—is one who, strictly speaking, believes that at every moment of its existence the universe is under the direct control of God and is an expression of God’s free will. God’s free will, of course, happens to express itself in ordered and regular patterns. But from the standpoint of the deist the universe is more like a vast clockwork machine which God created and wound up in the beginning and left to its own devices without further interference, because the manner in which he had constructed it was perfect.

But you can see what this shift from theism to deism meant in practice. It meant that, for all practical purposes of scientific thought and prediction, the existence of God didn’t have to be considered. All one had to take into consideration was the mechanical structure which the Lord had laid down in the beginning, the principles or laws of nature which he had set in motion—immutable and eternal—and which then, as it were, governed the world by themselves. So, in effect, the thought of the West in the eighteenth and again in the nineteenth centuries was a conception of nature as obeying laws without any further lawgiver. Law, of course, seems to imply logically a lawgiver, but it also implies—and this, for our purposes, is considerably more important—implies the idea of the law obeyer. We speak, for example, of a falling rock as obeying the law of gravity, as if in some way the law of gravity pre-existed the falling of the rock in rather the same way that rails precede the course of a train or a streetcar; as if, therefore, the universe were a network of forceful, but perhaps intangible and invisible, rails or tracks along which everything moves when it moves. And therefore, falling rocks and so on and so forth are held to obey these tracks.

Now, I think I’m right in saying that, more and more, this conception is found unnecessary in contemporary scientific thought, because it is an unnecessary complication. And one of the interesting characteristics of all scientific theories is what we might call simplicity—that is to say, the cutting out of all elements in an explanation of some phenomena which seem to be unnecessary. In a way, of course, this is an aesthetic as well as a practical criterion. I remember when I was being taught in school the art of writing: my teachers insisted firmly on the discipline of going over everything I had written and cutting out every unnecessary word. Of course, they didn’t mean unnecessary in a purely practical sense, as, for example: you cut out unnecessary words in writing a telegram, which would of course perhaps involve in the writing of prose the cutting out of every sort of poetic metaphor, but rather even in constructing your metaphors: not to spoil anything by saying more than is necessary to convey the sense. And this is an extremely valuable discipline, not only in effecting the beauty of writing, but also in making it more intelligible. And the scientist does exactly the same sort of thing when he prunes his theories.

And so for science today the question of whether there are laws of nature which things themselves obey is a question of: is this perhaps an unnecessarily complicated way of talking about things? In recent talks I have dwelt at some length on certain other unnecessary ideas, in particular that of the presence of stuff, material or substance, as that out of which the shapes of life are made, and have dwelt upon the idea that it’s perfectly adequate to talk about life in terms of structure, or of form, or of operation, and that we don’t really need any idea of the stuff which is formed at all. This is not necessary for any scientific purpose.

And so, in the same way, we could say that laws of nature must be reduced in science to a mere figure of speech. And if it is a figure of speech, it’s going to become obvious that “law” is not the best word for the kinds of regularity which we observe in the natural universe. Because law, as I said, involves the notion of a preexisting pattern which things follow, so that you get the dualism of the pattern and the things—or the pattern and the particular events. You don’t need this dualism. There are simply the events. And the events are patterns. And these patterns have certain observable regularities as they work.

But we can sharpen this concept further by saying that the patterns may be regarded as having observable regularities because of the structure of those who observe them. This is fundamental to the idea of a regularity. How do you know something is regular? You know something is regular by comparing it with something else. And this something else which is your standard of comparison must itself be regular. Take for example a clock: a clock is an even-moving hand upon a dial marked out with regular intervals. There are very few things in nature as regular as a clock. Nature’s rhythms are apt to pulsate in anything but a monotonous way. But the clock is purely and strictly monotonous. And this is its advantage. And what we do is: we compare natural rhythms—the rhythm of breath or the rhythm of the heartbeat or whatever it may be—with the regular rhythm of the clock. And we find that, to some extent, these rhythms can be made to be correlated with each other. We can always describe irregular rhythms in terms of a regular rhythm. So, in the same way, when we make a ruler: a ruler is marked out in even intervals of one inch. And we can apply this to any object that we want to measure in terms of length, knowing full well that the ruler does not actually divide this thing into separate bits, each one inch long.

And so, in the same way, for more complicated things we can apply such forms of measurement as what we call the laws of probability. But these, again, are not exactly laws. They are simply mathematical patterns which help us to predict rather complicated events. But, you see, the whole idea of this is that regularity is a scale which man has invented, and which he projects upon the universe around him. And this scale is something which the world fits to some extent. It’s quite easy to see why it should. If we agree about our scales—we agree about the length of a meter or the length of a foot—then we have a common language (that is to say: a regular language) for talking about the world.

Now, besides these instruments which we make—like clocks and rulers—there is a deeper instrument, and that is the structure of our own organisms, of our senses, of our brains, and so forth. And I might add the structure of our languages. And these two are instruments through which and by which we interpret the external world. Now, it so turns out, you see, that wherever you find human beings, the structure of their eyes and ears and the structure of their brains is the same. If it weren’t, you see, they wouldn’t be human beings. What defines a human being as a human being is the similarity of structure. It therefore is going to follow that all beings having that particular structure will observe the universe in ways that are determined by that structure. In other words, if you look at your surroundings through a teleidoscope—you know, this new gadget that you can look through, and instead of using bits of glass as the basis for the pattern, it uses the surrounding world. Because of the structure of the teleidoscope, which is two mirrors set at an angle of 45 degrees behind a lens, it will always structure whatever is looked at in a particular way. It will turn it, in other words, into a, as I remember it, an eight-fold star of pattern. And so everything looked at through this instrument will have this basic regularity.

So, in very much the same way, anything looked at through an instrument which has the structure of the human eye, and behind it the system of the optical nerves, will have a common structure. You see it is this that gives us the strong impression that, wherever we look at the world—whether we study the operations of nature on the Earth or whether we study them in the most distant galaxies—they all seem to have a common character which we sometimes put in the form of saying that the laws of nature are everywhere uniform. All that really means is that the observer of what is happening is the same observer, and therefore for that observer nature operates in the same way.

But it seems to me that one can carry this way of looking at things just a little too far. One of the great modern philosophers of science, Karl Popper, calls this way of looking at things instrumentalism. And by this he means the idea that natural order, or regularities in nature, are simply patterns imposed upon external events by the human mind; that what we call natural laws or natural regularities are not discoveries of something going on out there, but are simply inventions. Inventions for dealing with nature in exactly the same sense as hammers and knives and saws and other instruments for pushing the world around or dividing it up.

The difficulty behind instrumentalism is that it overlooks the fact that it argues too great an isolation between man and the world. If we say, in other words: the world is a chaos, something like a Rorschach blot but even more formless. The world is a chaos. It has no meaning, no regularity, no order in itself whatsoever. All order is something projected by the human mind into it, so that the human mind remains the sole source of order in nature. The difficulty of that way of looking at things is that it isolates the human mind from the natural environment. The human mind, with its particular structure, is part and parcel of the environment, and man does not stand outside nature ever as an independent observer. He’s always involved in what he sees. And therefore the regularity of structure between man and man is undoubtedly a regularity within nature itself. But again, a regularity does not involve a law. It does not involve the idea of a sort of transcendental pattern which exists in some sort of abstract state, and which concrete events follow.

This seems to me, too, to have some interesting ethical consequences. You see, when we argue about ethical conduct and what are the bases for it, a great deal of our searching seems to be the search for a set of rules existing independently of ourselves. Again, a hangover from the idea that there are some laws laid down by a transcendent God which we are supposed to obey, or else something which is absolutely natural for a human being to do because of the law of human nature. But here, again, the confusion seems to arise because we think of our nature or structure as something separate from ourselves; as it were, preexisting us.

And I think what we need to realize is that the order of human nature is not something apart from every man and every woman, but the pattern which we follow in our activities—not always intelligently—is ourselves, just as the pattern of our skeleton and our bones is us. And this is not a pattern laid down in advance which, in turn, we, something distinct from it, follow. This simply is our unconscious design of operation. And the task of science is simply to make it as conscious as possible. It can never make it completely conscious, just as a light, in a way, doesn’t shine on itself. So the human being cannot stand outside himself to make himself completely objective. But he can acquire some idea of his basic form, and this must be the basis for all his ideas of the intelligent regulation of human life. It must fit what is his own basic functioning. But when he hypothesizes some independent design which he is supposed to be following, this seems to me to introduce an unnecessary and indeed confusing concept.