158

G126

of nature, and indeed all experiential laws were results of evolution, being developed out of utterly causeless determinations of single events under a tendency to habit-taking conjoined with a survival of the fittest, their fitness consisting in their growth not essentially tending to produce characters that would necessarily remove any objects that conformed to them from the sphere of experience; the tendency to habit-forming itself growing under this very influence. Since putting forward that theory, I have in the intervening years, been led to make a slight though fundamental modification of it; no longer supposing that it was from single fortuitous events that law[s] have developed; since that could not account for the origin of time itself, but from the fortuitous embodiments of characters and forms of relationship. It is plain that if this hypothesis were true, it would account for the existence of laws in nature. It remains to test this hypothesis by deducing experiential consequences from it and comparing these virtual predictions with the facts