xl REPORT—1845. 
should lose their present vagueness, and come to receive some distinct scien- 
tific interpretation. It is one thing, however, to suggest that our present 
language and conceptions should be held as provisional—another to recom- 
mend a general unsettling of all received ideas. Whatever innovations of 
this kind may arise, they can only be introduced slowly, and on a full sense 
of their necessity ; for the limited faculties of our nature will bear but little 
of this sort at a time without a kind of intoxication, which precludes all rec- 
tilinear progress—or, rather, all progress whatever, except in a direction 
which terminates in the wildest vagaries of mysticism and clairvoyance. 
But, without going into any subtleties, I may be allowed to suggest that 
it is at least high time that philosophers, both physical and others, should 
come to some nearer agreement than appears to prevail as to the meaning 
they intend to convey in speaking of causes and causation. On the one hand 
we are told that the grand object of physical inquiry is to explain the phz- 
nomena of nature by referring them to their causes; on the other, that the 
inquiry into causes is altogether vain and futile, and that Science has no 
concern but with the discovery of Jaws. Which of these is the truth? Or 
are both views of the matter true on a different interpretation of the terms ? 
Whichever view we may take, or whichever interpretation adopt, there is one 
thing certain,—the extreme inconvenience of such a state of language. This 
can only be reformed by a careful analysis of this widest of all human gene- 
ralizations, disentangling from one another the innumerable shades of mean- 
ing which have got confounded together in its progress, and establishing 
among them a rational classification and nomenclature. Until this is done 
we cannot be sure, that by the relation of cause and effect one and the same 
kind of relation is understood. Indeed, using the words as we do, we are 
quite sure that the contrary is often the case; and so long as uncertainty in 
this respect is suffered to prevail, so long will this unseemly contradiction 
subsist, and not only prejudice the cause of science in the eyes of mankiid, 
but create disunion of feeling, and even give rise to accusations and recri- 
minations on the score of principle among its cultivators. 
The evil I complain of becomes yet more grievous when the idea of law 
is brought so prominently forward as not merely to throw into the back- 
ground that of cause, but almost to thrust it out of view altogether; and if 
not to assume something approaching to the character of direct agency, at 
feast to place itself in the position of a substitute for what mankind in general 
understand by explanation: as when we are told, for example, that the suc- 
cessive appearance of races of organized beings on earth, and their disappear- 
ance, to give place to others, which Geology teaches us, is a result of some 
certain law of development, in virtue of which an unbroken chain of gra- 
dually exalted organization from the crystal to the globule, and thence, 
through the successive stages of the polypus, the mollusk, the insect, the fish, 
the reptile, the bird, and the beast, up to the monkey and the man (nay, for 
aught we know, even to the angel), has been (or remains to be) evolved. 
Surely, when we hear such a theory, the natural human craving after causes, 
capable in some conceivable way of giving rise to such changes and trans- 
formations of organ and intellect,—causes why the development at different 
parts of its progress should divaricate into different lines,—cawses, at all 
events, intermediate between the steps of the development—becomes im- 
portunate. And when nothing is offered to satisfy this craving, but loose 
and vague reference to favourable circumstances of climate, food, and general 
situation, which no experience has ever shown to convert one species into 
another ; who is there who does not at once perceive that such a theory is in 
no-respect more explanatory, than that would be which simply asserted a 
miraculous intervention at every successive step of that unknown series of 
