178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not only be the height of presumption in me to attempt to fix the 

 meaning of a word which has been used by so grave authority in so 

 many and various senses ; but it would seem a thankless task to do 

 that once more which has been done so often at sundry times and in 

 divers manners before. And yet without this we cannot determine 

 what we mean by saying that the order of Nature is reasonable. I 

 shall evade the difficulty by telling you Mr. Grote's opinion. 1 You 

 come to a scarecrow and ask, " "What is the cause of this ? " You find 

 that a man made it to frighten the birds. You go away and say to 

 yourself: "Every thing resembles this scarecrow. Every thing has a 

 purpose." And from that day the word " cause " means for you what 

 Aristotle meant by " final cause." Or you go into a hair-dresser's 

 shop, and wonder what turns the wheel to which the rotatory brush is 

 attached. On investigating other parts of the premises, you find a 

 man working away at a handle. Then you go away and say : " Every 

 thing is like that wheel. If I investigated enough I should always 

 find a man at a handle." And the man at the handle, or whatever 

 corresponds to him, is henceforth known to you as " cause." 



And so generally. When you have made out any sequence of 

 events to your entire satisfaction, so that you know all about it, the 

 laws involved being so familiar that you seem to see how the begin- 

 ning must have been followed by the end, then you apply that as a 

 simile to all other events whatever, and your idea of cause is deter- 

 mined by it. Only when a case arises, as it always must, to which 

 the simile will not apply, you do not confess to yourself that it was 

 only a simile and need not apply to every thing, but you say, " The 

 cause of that event is a mystery which must remain forever unknown 

 to me." On equally just grouuds, the nervous system of my umbrella 

 is a mystery which must remain forever unknown to me. My um- 

 brella has no nervous system ; and the event to which your simile did 

 not apply has no cause in your sense of the word. When we say, then, 

 that every effect has a cause, we mean that every event is connected 

 with something in a way that might make somebody call that the 

 cause of it. But I, at least, have never yet seen any single meaning 

 of the word that could be fairly applied to the tchole order of Nature. 



From this remark I cannot even except an attempt recently made 

 by Mr. Bain to give the word a universal meaning, though I desire to 

 speak of that attempt with the greatest respect. Mr. Bain a wishes to 

 make the word " cause " hang on in some way to what we call the law 

 of energy ; but, though I speak with great diffidence, I do think a care- 

 ful consideration will show that the introduction of this word "cause" 

 can only bring confusion into a matter which is distinct and clear 

 enough to those who have taken the trouble to understand what 

 energy means. It would be impossible to explain that this evening ; 

 Ibut I may mention that "energy" is a technical term out of mathe 



1 Flato, vol. ii. (Phscdon). s '' Inductive Logic," chap. iv. 



