CHAPTER XIII.

CAUSATION.

ON this subject a much sounder doctrine than that entertained by most metaphysicians has been laid down by Professor Bain, who, however, has neglected to unfold all that is in the mental phenomenon which he has noticed. "As regards muscular exertion, there is a notable specialty, a radical difference in kind, signified "by such phrases as the sense of power,' 'the feeling "of energy put forth,' 'the experience of force or re 'sistance.' This is an ultimate phase of the human consciousness, and the most general and fundamental of all our conscious states. By this experience [observe, not a gathered experience] we body forth "to ourselves a notion of force or power." He believes that "the combined movements of locomotion are original or instinctive" (Senses and Intell., pp. 98, 267). Here, then, we have a perception, original and intuitive, of things exercising power. We are immediately conscious of power exerted, and we find it producing an effect. Again, things become known to us as exercising power upon us, and we know an effect as

proceeding from a cause. This perception of power exercised by us, and upon us, is the primary cognition of things on which all our judgments as to causation are founded. Our knowledge both of self and of external objects is of things effecting and being effected.

Mr. Mill tells us in his Logic, that he has no intention of entering into the merits of the question of causation" as a problem of transcendental metaphysics." And yet in his logical treatment of the subject he is ever introducing, I think unfortunately, metaphysical speculations. In the discussion he has confounded (in this respect like some of the Scottish metaphysicians) the principle of causation with that of the uniformity of nature. When we say that nature is uniform, we mean that nature constitutes a course or system; that there is in it a determinate number of agents, or rather a fixed amount of energy, actual or potential, operating according to laws and in an arranged constitution. That there is an invariable uniformity in nature, is discovered by a long experience. It is certainly not an obvious truth forced upon us by an early and easy observation. Judging by first appearances, it looks as if nature often acted unsystematically, or was swayed by influences out of its sphere. The mother finds her child in health today, sick to-morrow, better the third day, and dead the next; so far from showing a uniformity, it seems rather to indicate a change of agency, springing either from an unknown fatality or the will of a supernatural being. It is only as the result of long and patient research,

conducted independently in the various departments of nature and of history, that we reach the reasonable conviction that there is a fixed system constituted amidst these seeming irregularities.

Now it is, in fact, of this uniformity of nature that Mr. Mill is treating in his chapter on the "Evidence of Universal Causation." He is right in saying of it, "There "must have been a time when the universal prevalence "of that law throughout nature could not have been "affirmed in the same confident and unqualified man"ner as at present." He is further right, so far as the uniformity of nature is concerned, when he says that the reasons for our reliance on it "do not hold in cir-"cumstances unknown to us, and beyond the possible "range of our experience. In distant parts of the "stellar regions, where the phenomena may be entirely "unlike those with which we are acquainted, it would "be folly to affirm confidently that this general law

prevails, any more than those special ones which we "have found to hold universally on our own planet. "The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise I called the law of causation, must be received not as a "law of the universe, but of that portion of it only "which is within the range of our means of sure ob"servation, with a reasonable degree of extension to "adjacent cases." In this passage he identifies "the uniformity in the succession of events" with "the law of causation." But these are not the same. It is quite conceivable that there may be worlds in which there is a universal causation, and yet no self-contained system

of natural causes. Some, or many, or in fact all of the phenomena might be produced by agents acting from above or beyond the phenomena themselves,--say by the Divine Being, or angels, or demons. In such a world spring might follow winter one year, and be prevented from following it the next by the action of a supra-mundane influence; and no one would be able. from the past to anticipate the future. In this state of things there would be no uniformity of physical agencies, and yet there would be an invariable causation. Now the grand metaphysical question is not about the uniformity of nature, but about the relation of cause and effect. There is a momentary discovery of the difference of the two, and yet a studious identification of them in the following passage :— "There was a time "when many of the phenomena of nature must have appeared altogether capricious and irregular, not governed by any laws, nor steadily consequent upon "6 any causes. Such phenomena, indeed, were com monly in that early stage of human knowledge asIcribed to the direct intervention of the will of some supernatural being, and therefore still to a cause.”

It is admitted that the great body of mankind, whether they are or are not persuaded of the existence of a uniform system of nature, believe as to every effect, as to every new thing produced, or change upon an old thing, that it must have had a cause, whether natural or supernatural. The question is, Is this belief in

tuitive?

This conviction can stand the tests of intuition. On

the bare contemplation of a new phenomenon, that is, of a new thing appearing, of a thing which did not exist before, we declare that it has had a producing cause. It certainly appears in very early life, before there can be a lengthened or wide observation or enumeration of instances. It is strong in very primitive states of society, long before mankind had observed an invariable uniformity in the occurrence of natural phenomena. It can be shown that it is necessary and universal. Mr. Mill indeed tells us, "I am convinced that "any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who

66

will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, will, "when his imagination has once learned to entertain "the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one for instance of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, " events may succeed one another at random, without 'any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience or "in our mental nature constitute a sufficient, or indeed

any, reason for believing that this is nowhere the case." The phrase, "fixed law," here employed, is ambiguous ; it may mean a mere natural or physical law, such as that of attraction. And I acknowledge at once that it is quite possible to apprehend and to believe that there may be worlds in which new phenomena, or changes on old phenomena, may be produced, without the operation of that law of gravitation which seems to act everywhere in our mundane system. But the real question is, would not the mind insist, and this according to "a fixed law" of our "mental nature," that the event must have a