second. "Well, we explode the gunpowder. Can we conceive that existence has been diminished by the annihilation of a single element previously in being, or increased by the addition of a single element which was not heretofore in nature?" The truth is, men generally never think at all in this manner. How few know that air and water are compounds! A ploughman, when he shoots a hare, has a perfect knowledge of all the concurring secondary causes which are set in motion by his first free-will power, and which, if not exerted, no effect would follow, as a matter of course, hence his responsibility. They thus arrive at the knowledge of power in every cause by a much simpler way, as I have already proved. All admit that everything changes-omnia mutantur-but "nihil interit" is a very different thing. We can write our names on sand, or blot out a word for ever! Yet Sir William said nothing perishes. "This is what we think, yea, what we must think. As I have said, we think to very little purpose. "This, then, is the mental phenomenon of causality-that we necessarily deny in thought that the object which appears to begin to be really so begins; and that we necessarily identify its present with its past existence." If this were true, it would be a universal truth which no one could deny; but so far from this being the case, Combe founded his whole materialistic system on the assumption that certain elements, when combined, give rise to new creations. "Mind," he said, "is one of these, and at death it perishes for ever as if it had never been!" Sir William adds, "The principle that every event should have its causes is necessary and universal, and is imposed on us as a condition of our human intelligence itself." It is no such thing. It is not an innate truth. It is only discovered and made known to the mind by its internal experience. Instinct at first teaches us to reach out our arm; emotion creates desire; intellect judges and resolves; the will power, lastly, executes. Sir William had a mortal antipathy towards my much-revered teacher, DR THOMAS BROWN. I think I see him now. His sweet and gently smiling face was crowned with an ivory-white manly brow, while his finelyformed head marked him out as one well skilled in moral law. One hand held up his gown, the other held his written roll; his right arm pressed it to his breast. No yells were heard, no showers of pease were seen to fall! "Silence," was never his command, when our greater than Pythagoras sat in his moral chair. Dr Brown held that the knowledge of power in a cause did not rest on experience alone, that is, as seen in the mere suc cession of events," which Hume said was all that the mind could possibly perceive. "Hume set this point at rest for ever," said Hamilton! "We must have recourse, therefore," said Brown, "to some other principle which converts the simple facts of experience into a general expectation or confidence that is afterwards to be physically the guide of all our plans and actions. This principle, since it cannot be derived from experience itself, which relates only to the past, must be an original principle in our nature. Hence he called it "instinctive." Sir William himself had just said, "The principle that every event should have its causes is imposed on us as a condition of our intelligence,' and so said Brown. He did not expressly say that we instinctively raise our arm to ward off a blow. But he expressly stated that there was no mystery in the matter whatever, and I have proved that he was correct. Dr Brown was thus not one whit behind Hamilton, Stewart, or any of his predecessors. But Sir William seemed determined on all occasions to vent his bad feeling by casting obloquy on the memory of a muchhonoured name. Hence Sir William quoted Professor Wilson's criticism on Dr Brown's theory to shew that Dr Brown had no just ideas at all. Wilson evidently misrepresented Brown. Wilson held "that there is more in our mind than a conviction of the past and a foretaste of the future;" so said Brown. Again, Wilson adds, "There is besides this the conception included of a fixed constitution of their nature which determines the event, (so said Brown)-a constitution which, while it lasts, makes the event a necessary consequence of the situation in which the objects are placed. We should say, then, that there are included in these terms 'power' and 'susceptibility of changes,' two ideas which are not expressed in Dr Brown's analysis. It is certain from the whole tenor of his work that Dr Brown had designed to exclude the idea of necessity from his analysis." It must be evident to every one that Dr Brown had no such design at all. He simply said it was from a necessity of our nature, and not from the regular successions of things themselves, tha we came to perceive the idea of power in every cause. Having thus, as he thought, slain his hated opponent by Wilson's crutch, which he said "admirably expressed what I have always felt is the grand and fundamental defect in Dr Brown's theory," he never afterwards considered Brown's opinion as worth one fig. Thus, when speaking of the opinions of other men, he always adds, "We will discount that of Brown"! Was this just? Certainly not. It was as much out of place as its application to Brown was false and malignant. I have, in proving my position, only done the duty incumbent on every pupil when his revered teacher's name is unjustly assailed. Sir William, in a very summary way, gets quit of Biran and all his opponents, in order that he might establish his own pet notion, which he considered the greatest discovery of modern times! He called it THE LAW OF THE CONDITIONED. Sir William regarded the judgment of causality as derived, not from our internal and external experience, which is the simple truth, but from an impotence of mind, the principle of the conditioned. In attempting to explain, he took for granted certain laws of thought. "Those," said he," which I postulate, are such as are generally admitted by all who allow the mind. itself to be a source of cognitions, and the only one which has not been recognised by them is the law of the conditioned -the law that the conceivable has always two opposite extremes, and that these extremes are equally inconceivable. That the conditioned is to be viewed not as a power, but as a powerlessness, is evinced from this, that the two extremes are contradictories, and as contradictories, though neither alternative can be conceived, thought as possible,-one or other must be admitted to be necessary. This is certainly profound, but as the two extremes are inconceivable, how is it possible that they can be cognisable in any respect whatever? How can we reason but from what we know? "All thought," he said, "implies the thought of existence. Cogito ergo sum. I cannot think that I think without thinking that I exist. I cannot be conscious without being conscious that I am. As a second category or subjective condition of thought, I postulate that of time. It is the necesssary condition of every conscious act; thought is only realised to us in succession; and succession is only conceived by us under the concept of time. Existence, and existence in time, is thus the elementary form of our intelligence." Dugald Stewart held the contrary opinion, and said that conception, which he ranks as a distinct power of the mind, implies no idea of time whatever; that is, it is conversant about ideas or relations which have no relation to time. (Elem. p. 134.) "But we do not conceive existence in time absolutely and infinitely, we conceive it only as conditioned in time; and existence conditioned in time expresses at once, and in relation, the three categories of thought which afford us, in combination, the principle of causality." Sir William has omitted his third category in toto! His editor has supplied it from another source. It meant space, but Sir William had said that the idea of space did not apply to the thinking principle at all! Such carelessness on the part of Sir William is not very creditable to an Edinburgh university. When we perceive or imagine an object, it is, 1st, as existent, and 2d, as in time. That is, as thinking it, I cannot but think it to exist; I cannot annihilate it in thought." This is doubtful. I see my name on the sand, a wave washes it out. Does it still exist? I may write it again, but I cannot possibly restore it to its exact original shape. "I may," he said, "think away from it, I may turn to other things, and I can thus exclude it from my consciousness; but actually thinking it I cannot think it as non-existent, for as it is thought, so is it thought existent." "Time," he adds, "is present, past, and future. We cannot think an object of thought as non-existent de presenti-as an actual object of thought. But can we think that quantum of existence of which an object, real or ideal, is the complement, as non-existent, either in time past or in time future? Make the experiment. Try to think the object of your thought as non-existent in the moment before the present. You cannot. Try it in the moment before that. You cannot. Nor can you annihilate it by carrying it back to any moment, however distant, in the past. You may conceive the parts of which this complement of existence is composed, as separated; if a material object, you can think it is shivered to atoms, sublimated into æther; but not one iota of existence can you conceive as annihilated, which subsequently you thought to exist." All this may be very profound, but what has it to do with the common-sense principle of causality? If so, Plato was not to blame for thinking this ever changing world had an eternal existence. Neither were the ancient sceptics foolish when they held that all things had sprung from an eternally existing chaotic mass, and, having all come by chance, might all vanish by chance, and in a moment perish as if they had never been. "So shall one hour at last this globe control, Break up the vast machine, dissolve the whole; "In like manner," said he, "try the future,-try to conceive the prospective annihilation of any present object, of any atom of any present object. You cannot. All this may be possible, but of it we cannot think the possibility. But if you can thus conceive neither the absolute commencement nor the absolute termination of anything that is once thought to exist, try, on the other hand, if you can conceive the opposite alternative of infinite non-commencement, of infinite non-termination. this you are equally impotent. This is the category of the conditioned, as applied to the category of existence under the category of time. To "But in this application is the principle of causality not given? Why, what is the law of causality? Simply this, that when an object is presented phænomenally as commencing, we cannot but suppose that the complement of existence, which it now contains, has previously been-in other words, that all that we at present come to know as an effect must previously have existed in its causes; though what these causes are we may perhaps be altogether unable even to surmise." There is no end of speculation, and it is no marvel that secularists lose themselves when they depart from the doctrines of eternal truth. Sir William here landed himself in what is called a perfect fix. But this is not all. "What must be admitted as to the present," he said, "may possibly be denied of the past and future. But if we make the experiment, we shall find that mental annihilation of an object is equally impossible under time, past or future. To obviate misapprehension, however, I must make a very simple observation. "When I say that it is impossible to annihilate an object in thought, in other words, to conceive it as non-existent, it is of course not meant that it is impossible to imagine the object wholly changed in form. We can figure to ourselves the elements of which it is composed, distributed and arranged and modified in ten thousand forms, we can imagine anything of it, short of annihilation. But the complement, the quantum, of existence, which is realised in any object, that we cannot represent to ourselves, either as increased, without abstraction from other bodies, or as diminished, without addition to them. In short, we are unable to construe it in thought, that there can be an atom absolutely added, or an atom absolutely taken away from existence in general. Make the experiment. Form to yourselves a notion of the universe; how can you conceive that the quantity of existence, of which the universe is the sum, is either amplified or diminished? You can conceive the creation of a world as lightly as you can conceive the creation of an atom. But what is creation?" It is not the springing of nothing into something. "Far from it it is conceived, and by us conceivable, merely as the evolution of a new form of existence by the fiat of the Deity." If so, the book of Genesis cannot be true. "Let us suppose," said he, "the very crisis of creation. Can we realise it to ourselves in thought, that the moment after the universe came into manifested being, there was a larger complement of existence in the universe and its author together, than there was before in the Deity himself alone? This we cannot imagine." If this be so, is it not plain that the Deity may, after all, be only a material being? Hence the human soul may also be, nay, must necessarily be, as Combe maintained, a mere compound of material elements. The very thought is horrifying to every simple mind. "What I have now said," he adds, "of our conceptions of creation, holds true of our conceptions of annihilation. We can conceive no real annihilation, no absolute sinking of some |