  Ward’s social account of the natural world provides the foundation for an original account of natural laws that he conceived of as statistical, evolved and transient. In the first place, in a universe that is ultimately social, natural laws must be of the like of economic or anthropological laws; as such, they hold for groups of monads rather than for individual ones and are statistical generalizations rather than eternally fixed decrees. Secondly, natural laws are to be regarded as the products of evolution because they record the habitual behavior of groups of socialized monads, and habits have to be acquired or ‘learned’ over time. Thirdly, it is a historical platitude that societies emerge and decay. Since the natural laws dominating a given epoch depend upon that epoch’s social order, natural laws cannot be regarded as immutable; like all finite realities, they too are likely to change in the course of cosmic history.