Huxley's laws describe expectations, not demonstrated necessities
It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things.
Huxley's own account complicates this accusation. In Hume (first published 1879), he says that repeated experience yields probabilities, and that calling it a natural law does not strengthen them. He allows a conceivable reversal of customary events and treats a revived dead person as evidence that our formulation was incomplete. He distinguishes this possibility from the evidence required to believe a particular report. These positions come strikingly close to Chesterton's distinction between practical confidence and logical necessity. See the Clark transcription of Collected Essays, VI, part II, chapter VII, pp. 155–158, ‘The Order of Nature: Miracles’.
There is nevertheless a real disagreement about terminology. Huxley's Introductory Science Primer (1880; inspected here in its 1887 Appleton edition), §§9–10, distinguishes laws from causes and makes conduct depend on knowledge of regularity. A true law permits no exception; an apparent exception corrects our statement. Chesterton instead calls the possible event a miracle and denies that ‘law’ properly describes the regularity. Huxley explicitly distinguishes commands from descriptive assertions, whereas Chesterton's prison analogy demands an intelligible purpose of enactment. Their disagreement therefore concerns what law means as well as what observation warrants. Primer, pp. 12–16.
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