208 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



in the first instance from what we know of ourselves, and 

 we argue analogically from what is within us to what is 

 external to us. One of the first experiences of an infant 

 is that of his willing and doing ; and, as time goes on, one 

 of the first temptations of the boy to bring home to himself 

 the fact of his arbitrary power, though it may be at the price 

 of waywardness, mischievousness, and disobedience, and 

 when his parents, as antagonists of this wilfulness, begin to 

 restrain him, and to bring his mind and conduct into shape, 

 then he has a second series of experiences of cause and 

 effect, and that upon a principle or rule. Thus, the notion 

 of causation is one of the first lessons he learns from ex 

 perience, that experience limiting it to agents possessed 

 of intelligence and will. It is the notion of power, combined 

 with a purpose and an end. Physical phenomena, as such, 

 are without sense ; and experience tells us nothing about- 

 physical phenomena as causes. Accordingly, whenever the 

 world is young, the movements and changes of physical 

 nature have been and are spontaneously ascribed by its 

 inhabitants to the presence and will of hidden agents who 

 haunt every part of it, the woods, the mountains, and the 

 streams, the air, and the stars, for good or for evil. 1 



In this belief, resting, as Cardinal Newman says, on an 

 inference by analogy, we find the fruitful germ of all early 

 mythologies. When Patroclus was to die, it was the sun- 

 god that loosened the clasps of his armour. At first it is 

 the regular processes of nature that are personified ; only 

 at a later stage are supernatural agencies detached from 

 the events they were identified with, and endowed with 

 the power of altering their course. The earlier stage is 

 characteristic of the Iliad, the later of the Odyssey. 



In other words, the notion of force, or causality, is produced 

 in the mind by the effort to resist constraint or overcome 

 an obstacle, and is the invariable accompaniment or ante 

 cedent of every voluntary act. Actions that are produced 

 automatically, and in the absence of resistance, are not accom 

 panied by the feeling of power, or force, or causation. The 

 attribution of causal energy to events in the natural world 

 is a survival of the old propensity to personify them, in its 



1 Grammar of Assent, p. 63. 



