THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA 



versality of causation, the doctrine of eternal and 

 immitigable and all-embracing consequence, has 

 lately become a platitude; and a platitude may 

 perhaps be defined as an unrealized truth. When 

 men throw this term at a proposition, the chances 

 are high that their irritation is due to a conscious- 

 ness that their subservience to the truth stated is 

 not what it might be. The veritable philosopher, 

 I believe, will never show irritation or scorn for a 

 platitude; for to him an assertion of any truth 

 can never be flat, stale, and unprofitable. Though 

 it were older than any of the hills, yet truth is new 

 every morning. Furthermore, it might be reason- 

 ably expected that the most salient and significant 

 truths would be the first to be discovered, so that 

 Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he said 

 that the commonplaces are the great poetic truths. 

 To confess to irritation at a platitude is to admit 

 that one's palate for truth is sated. 



I therefore commend to the reader's considera- 

 tion this well-worn but never threadbare proposi- 

 tion that causation is universal. It is essentially 

 a product of the age of science, which declares 

 that there is neither chance (as the vulgar under- 

 stand chance) nor contradiction nor caprice in the 

 Cosmos, which believes in the omnipotence of law, 

 and which has no word of a vacillating and short- 

 sighted Providence. 



In his Study of Sociology Spencer himself has 

 discussed the means and training whereby the idea 

 of causation may be adequately realized by the 

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