Analogy and Immutability

Analogy is a major theme in the passage and leads us to the idea of the immutability of physical law: “The intensity of gravitation has never varied…nor does even analogy lead us to expect that it should…there is every reason to be assured that the great laws of the universe are immutable” (p116-117). By claiming our certainty of the nature of the universe in such a way, does Somerville fall into the fallacy of the ephemeral brought up by Diderot? Even if such laws and equations are truly absolute, what is it that makes a universe for them to describe?

Somerville states that the law of gravitation is divine and sublime in its simplicity, and affords “the greatest stability” to the universe (p116). If nature is at its most divine when it is most simple, does this ideal extend into the chain of being debate? The regenerating polyp would be seemingly above man. Yet, reason and analogy enable man to fit into God’s image, for example: the determination of the diameter of the earth’s orbit becomes “the first step of a scale by which [man] may ascend to the starry firmament” (p115). For Somerville, the power of the human mind has a divine origin in “a few fundamental axioms which have eternally existed in Him” (p117). If the human mind can reduce laws governing the physical universe down to basic formulas, are there “divine” laws governing reason and morality that we can also empirically understand?