384 INDUCTION. 



compound, of which nature is made up, are such Permanent 

 Causes. These have existed, and the effects or consequences 

 which they were fitted to produce have taken place (as often 

 as the other conditions of the production met,) from the very 

 beginning of our experience. But we can give no account of 

 the origin of the Permanent Causes themselves. Why these 

 particular natural agents existed originally and no others, or 

 why they are commingled in such and such proportions, and 

 distributed in such and such a manner throughout space, is a 

 question we cannot answer. More than this : we can discover 

 nothing regular in the distribution itself; we can reduce it to 

 no uniformity, to no law. There are no means by which, from 

 the distribution of these causes or agents in one part of space, 

 we could conjecture whether a similar distribution prevails in 

 another. The coexistence, therefore, of Primeval Causes, 

 ranks, to us, among merely casual concurrences : and all those 

 sequences or coexistences among the effects of several such 

 causes, which, though invariable while those causes coexist, 

 would, if the coexistence terminated, terminate along with it, 

 we do not class as cases of causation, or laws of nature : we 

 can only calculate on finding these sequences or coexistences 

 where we know by direct evidence, that the natural agents on 

 the properties of which they ultimately depend, are distributed 

 in the requisite manner. These Permanent Causes are not 

 always objects ; they are sometimes events, that is to say, 

 periodical cycles of events, that being the only mode in which 

 events can possess the property of permanence. Not only, for 

 instance, is the earth itself a permanent cause, or primitive 

 natural agent, but the earth s rotation is so too : it is a cause 

 which has produced, from the earliest period, (by the aid of 

 other necessary conditions,) the succession of day and night, 

 the ebb and flow of the sea, and many other effects, while, as 

 we can assign no cause (except conjecturally) for the rotation 

 itself, it is entitled to be ranked as a primeval cause. It is, 

 however, only the origin of the rotation which is mysterious to 

 us : once begun, its continuance is accounted for by the first 

 law of motion (that of the permanence of rectilinear motion 



