CONTINUITY (Law of).—(1) Persistence of movement through successive stages; (2) persistence of being through successive transformations. In the latter reference, now the most familiar, it is the expression of the indestructibility of matter and energy.
The law of continuity, though originally applied to continuity of motion, was extended by Charles Bonnet to continuity of being. He held that all the various beings which compose the universe form a descending scale without any chasm or saltus, from the Deity to the simplest forms of unorganised manner. A similar view had been held by Locke and others.
| The principle of continuity was one of the guiding ideas of the philosophy of Leibnitz. Kant also holds that «all phenomena are continuous quantities» (Critique of Pure Reason, Anticipations of Perception). For more recent usage in physical science, see Balfour Stewart’s Conservation of Energy, and Tait’s Recent Advances of Physical Science. «The grand principle of Conservation of Energy… is simply a statement of the invariability of the quantity of energy in the universe (Tait, p. 17). |
Modern science proclaims the continuity of Law, i.e., that the transition from lower to higher laws is not abrupt, but gradual, the former surviving, as it were, in the latter.
