CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 371 



on the basis of present experience that its contradictory is rationally 

 impossible. An event preceded by no other immediately and uni- 

 formly as cause would, according to traditional usage, arise out of 

 nothing. An event that was followed immediately and constantly 

 by no other would accordingly be an event that remained without 

 effect, and, did it pass away, it must disappear into nothing. The 

 old thought, well known in its scholastic formulation, ex nihilo nihil 

 fit, in nihilum nihil potest reverti, is only another expression for the 

 causal law as we have interpreted it above. The contradictories 

 to each of the clauses of the thought just formulated, that some- 

 thing can arise out of nothing and pass into nothing, remain there- 

 fore, as a consequence of empiricism, an improbable thought, to be 

 sure, but none the less a thought to which a real possibility must be 

 ascribed. 



It was in all probability this that Stuart Mill wished to convey 

 in the much-debated passage: "I am convinced that any one accus- 

 tomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties 

 for the purpose, will, when his imagination has once learnt to enter- 

 tain 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." For Mill immediately calls 

 our attention to the following: "Were we to suppose (what it is 

 perfectly possible to imagine) that the present order of the universe 

 were brought to an end, and that a chaos succeeded in which there 

 was no fixed succession of events, and the past gave no assurance of 

 the future; if a human being were miraculously kept alive to witness 

 this change, he surely would soon cease to believe in any uniformity, 

 the uniformity itself no longer existing." 1 



We can throw light from another side upon the thought that lies 

 in this outcome of the empiristic interpretation of the causal law. 

 If we still desire to give the name " effect " to an event that is pre- 

 ceded uniformly by no other, and that we therefore have to regard 

 as arising out of nothing, then we must say that it is the effect of 

 itself, that is, its cause lies in its own reality, in short, that it is 

 causa sui. Therefore the assumption that a causa sui has just as 

 much real possibility as have the causes of our experience which are 

 followed uniformly by another event, is a necessary consequence of 

 the empiristic view of causation. This much only remains sure, there 

 is nothing contained in our previous experience that in any way 

 assures us of the validity of this possible theory. 



The empiristic doctrine of causation requires, however, still fur- 



1 Logic, bk. in, ch. xxi, 1. 



