78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST great mystery, but in a way that is disrespectful of the depths of that mystery.... To say instead that God blessed one formula in some creative act, and dismissed the other, describes our own scientific mystery of nature in a more accurate and more humbling light." THE LAWS OF NATURE Though Misner's argument looks new with the sophistication of the mathematical concept of the signature of a metric, it may be pointed out that this is only a new version of a line which is at least as old as Leibnitz. One of the questions Leibnitz considered was why God chose to create, or "fulgurate" this particular universe of all the possible worlds conceived by his mind and equally capable of enactment. God, avers Leibnitz, is good. Therefore he chose the best of all possible worlds. However, even God, in making his choice could not flout the law of self-contradiction. He could not pick out the One can easily see the similarity between Misner's argument of the choice of signature and Leibnitz's argument on the selection ofcompossible elements. By pouring old wine into the new bottle of the signature Mis-ner is only making his own contribution to the bourgeois philsopher's endeavours to deny to matter primacy of existence. All science and dialectical materialism recognise that consciousness arises from organisation, as in the human brain. The philosophical category of matter expresses the general property of objects and phenomena which consists in their being objective reality, existing outside of man's consciousness and reflected in his consciousness. As Lenin put it, "Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them." Lenin's definition of matter reflects the fundamental contrast between materialism and idealism. If matter is primary and eternal, it is uncreat-able and indestructible, then it is the inner final cause of everything existing. In a world where matter is the primary cause, there is room neither for God nor any other supernatural forces. All the sciences also show that objects and processes are governed by invariant relationships. Processes do not take place haphazardly and erratically. Thus objects released in mid-air under a wide range of.con-ditions quite consistently fall to the ground. Wax in a candle, when heated, melts. These invariant relationships inside a wide variety of transformations are the laws obeyed by these objects and processes. Such relationships are necessary, in the sense that they could not have been otherwise, because they are inherent and essential aspects of what things