CAUSE AND EFFECT— PROBABILITY 127 



must, it is the descriptive how of the formula, the mere 

 summary of what has been observed, the inexplicable 

 routine. 



§ 7. — First Causes have tio Existence for Science 



We have now reached some very important conclusions 

 with regard to will as a cause. In the first place, the 

 only will known to us (or the only like will that we can 

 logically infer to exist) is seen not to be associated with 

 an arbitrary power to originate, alter, or stop a motion. 

 It appears merely as a secondary cause, as a stage in a 

 routine, but one where the knowable side of the routine 

 changes from the psychical to the physical. Further, 

 there lies in this will no power of enforcing a sequence of 

 motions. The will as first cause is merely a limit arising 

 from some impossibility in our powers of further following 

 the physical side of a routine, or of discovering its further 

 psychical side ; it is merely another way of saying : At 

 this point our ignorance begins. The moment the only 

 will we know or infer ceases to appear as the arbitrary 

 originator or enforcer of a sequence, so soon as it sinks to 

 a stage — if a remarkable stage — in a routine, then it 

 becomes idle to suppose will as the backbone of natural 

 phenomena. Will, as the creator and maintainer of 

 nature, is either a familiar term used anew for some un- 

 known and unthinkable existence, or if used in the only 

 sense now intelligible to us, that of a secondary cause or 

 stage in a routine, it gives us no assistance in comprehend- 

 ing routine. We are just as wise if we drop this will 

 behind phenomena, and content ourselves with observing 

 that there is a routine in perceptions. This, in fact, is 

 what science does, not unnecessarily multiplying causes, 

 when no simplification of perceptions arises from postulat- 

 ing their existence. 



We have seen that the conception of will as an arbitrary 

 source of motion arose historically, and not unnaturally, 

 from a portion of the routine of which will is a stage being 

 both physically and psychically screened from the observer, 



