1 6 DARWIN1ANI8M. 



case would, in all essentials, remain pretty well the same, 

 were there substituted for the stick the finger of a 

 corpse. Were there substituted, however, a living finger, 

 the force, the power of the fire would be felt ; for in 

 that case there are nerves. A piece of white wood 

 blackens under the clear drop that shall be one of 

 vitriol. The wood is blackened under the drop for the 

 same reason that the stick was blackened in the fire. 

 In either case the withdrawal of the water (call it simply 

 HO) left (C) the carbon in sight black. The wood 

 no more felt the power of the acid than the stick felt the 

 power of the fire ; but a living finger would be in case 

 to feel both. In all cases of causality, there is the 

 mediation of a tertium quid: there is the process, action, 

 motion of a middle term between the extremes. And it 

 is not by any means an objection in place to say this 

 middle term is not always known. A great many 

 middle terms are hidden from the savage ; but for us, 

 members of civilisation, science is only there to teach 

 us middle terms. In fact, just in a general regard, 

 and every way, civilisation is nothing but knowledge 

 of middle terms. Were the extremes in causality only, 

 as Brown would have them, strictly collateral, nakedly 

 collateral, an abstract AB (but invariable), then science 

 there would have been none, civilisation there would 

 have been none. Humanity itself is simply necessity 

 of rationale : it is alone the middle term that is the entire 

 secret of the universe. 



Reid, too, was on the whole unhappy in seeing power, 

 that is, middle terms, only in the case of animate causa- 

 tion ; for, at least so far as most people are concerned, it 

 is precisely in animate causation that, not unfrequently, 

 a middle term seems the want seems singly that which 

 is unable to be found. " How it is that anything so 

 remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about 



