CAUSE AND EFFECT— PROBABILITY 137 



immediate or stored — vanislies if these groups and 

 sequences have no permanent elements by which they can 

 be classified and compared. 



In the struggle for existence man has won his dictator- 

 ship over other forms of life by his power of foreseeing 

 the effects which flow from antecedent causes — not only 

 by his memory of past experience, but by his power of 

 codifying natural law, that is, by his power of generalising 

 experience in scientific statements. It was not necessary 

 for his success that he should know wJiy phenomena take 

 place, but only that he should know how they take place, 

 that he should be able to observe in them a routine, a 

 repeated sequence as a basis for his knowledge. We have 

 only to consider in some simple case — ^say that of the com- 

 bustion of coal — what would follow for man if the resulting 

 sense-impression were not uniform — if it were, for example, 

 either intense warmth or intense cold — to appreciate that 

 invariable order in the sequence of sense-impressions is 

 an absolute condition for man's knowledge, and therefore 

 for the foresight by aid of which he has won his dictator- 

 ship. In the chaos behind sensations, in the "beyond" 

 of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or 

 routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of 

 man on this side of sense-impressions. Yet if the supre- 

 macy of man is due to his reasoning faculty, so the 

 condition for the existence of man as a reasoning being 

 is routine in his perceptions, invariable order in the 

 sequences of his sense -impressions. We can neither 

 assert nor deny that this routine is due to something 

 beyond sense-impression, for in that " beyond " the word 

 routine is meaningless, and we can neither assert nor 

 deny where we are dealing with a field to which the word 

 knowledge cannot be applied. All we can assert is that 

 the reasoning faculty in man connotes a perceptive faculty 

 presenting sense-impressions in the same invariable order. 

 That this routine is due to the nature of the perceptive 

 faculty itself — to factors, of which we are unconscious in 

 its constitution, akin to the conscious association and 

 memory of the reasoning faculty — is a plausible if un- 



