LAW OF CAUSATION. 



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to light, there are very few which have any, even apparent, 

 pretension to this rigorous indefeasibility : and of those few, 

 one only has been found capable of completely sustaining it. 

 In that one, however, we recognise a law which is universal 

 also in another sense; it is coextensive with the entire field of 

 successive phenomena, all instances whatever of succession 

 being examples of it. This law is the Law of Causation. 

 The truth that every fact which has a beginning has a cause, 

 is coextensive with human experience. 



This generalization may appear to some minds not to 

 amount to much, since after all it asserts only this : " it is a 

 law, that every event depends on some law :" " it is a law, 

 that there is a law for everything." We must not, however, 

 conclude that the generality of the principle is merely verbal ; 

 it will be found on inspection to be no vague or unmeaning 

 assertion, but a most important and really fundamental truth. 



2. The notion of Cause being the root of the whole 

 theory of Induction, it is indispensable that this idea should, 

 at the very outset of our inquiry, be, with the utmost prac- 

 ticable degree of precision, fixed and determined. If, indeed, 

 it were necessary for the purpose of inductive logic that the 

 strife should be quelled, which has so long raged among the 

 different schools of metaphysicians, respecting the origin and 

 analysis of our idea of causation ; the promulgation, or at least 

 the general reception, of a true theory of induction, might be 

 considered desperate for a long time to come. But the 

 science of the Investigation of Truth by means of Evidence, 

 is happily independent of many of the controversies which 

 perplex the science of the ultimate constitution of the human 

 mind, and is under no necessity of pushing the analysis of 

 mental phenomena to that extreme limit which alone ought to 

 satisfy a metaphysician. 



I premise, then, that when in the course of this inquiry I 

 speak of the cause of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause 

 which is not itself a phenomenon ; I make no research into the 

 ultimate or ontological cause of anything. To adopt a dis- 

 tinction familiar in the writings of the Scotch metaphysicians, 



