CONCEPTS OF &quot; REASON &quot; AND &quot; CA USE 79 



degree or kind of certitude, anything beyond a mere feeling of expectation 

 that &quot; all possible cases &quot; will resemble the observed cases ? And even for 

 this feeling of expectation Mill can offer us no rational ground whatsoever. 

 He states that our actual experience enables us somehow to make up our 

 minds that a given observed antecedent of a phenomenon will continue to be 

 the antecedent of the latter unconditionally : which means &quot; whatever sup 

 position we may make about other things,&quot; or &quot; under all imaginable circum 

 stances &quot;. But this he immediately limits and qualifies by saying that the 

 antecedent will continue so only &quot; as long as the present constitution of 

 things endures&quot; or as long as, and on condition that, &quot; the ultimate laws of 

 nature (whatever they may be),&quot; do not -vary. So, after all, the &quot;uncondi 

 tional &quot; invariability turns out to be conditional. Our sense experience of 

 an unvaried sequence only enables us, therefore, to believe that the latter 

 will continue unvaried, z/and as long as &quot; the present constitution of things,&quot; 

 &quot; the ultimate laws of nature,&quot; will remain unaltered. And what rational 

 ground\&.vt we, according to Mill, for believing that &quot; the present constitution 

 of things &quot; will continue stable, and their &quot; ultimate laws &quot; unaltered ? He 

 does not tell us ; and for a good reason : his philosophy affords none. It 

 limits our knowledge to phenomena of sense ; it is agnostic : it informs us that 

 we can know facts, but nothing about the inner nature and ultimate causes of 

 those facts. And thus the empirical theory of induction, as of knowledge 

 generally, destroys all certitude by rearing the whole edifice of physical science 

 on the basis of an underlying confession of helpless and hopeless ignorance. 



In giving his final description of &quot; cause &quot; as the &quot; uncondition 

 ally &quot; invariable antecedent, Mill explained that the &quot; cause &quot; 

 must be not merely the hitherto invariable antecedent, but some 

 thing which is the antecedent in &quot;all possible cases&quot;. By this 

 he has been commonly interpreted to mean that the &quot; cause &quot; in 

 in the strict sense is the antecedent (or group of antecedents) 

 which is not merely &quot; sufficient &quot; 1 but &quot; indispensable &quot; for the ap 

 pearance of the consequent : not only the antecedent which is 

 invariably followed by the consequent in question, but by which 

 alone the consequent is invariably preceded : so that the invaria 

 bility is on both sides, the relation is a reciprocal one, and 

 inference can proceed from effect to cause as well as from cause 

 to effect. 



Thus we may distinguish, in Mill s account of causality, (i) 

 the looser scientific concept of &quot;cause&quot; as the antecedent (or 

 group of antecedents) which, when present, is always followed 

 by a certain consequent ; (2) the still looser popular concept of 

 &quot; cause &quot; as denoting some one prominent element of that group 

 (abstracting from the others) ; (3) the stricter and more exact 



1 In the sense of &quot; necessitating &quot;. This is the meaning commonly attached to 

 the word in regard to physical causes. A free cause may be &quot; sufficient &quot; (in the 

 ordinary sense of the word) to produce an effect, and yet not necessitate that effect. 



