LAW OF CAUSATION. 369 



been at his duty. His being off his post was no producing 

 cause, but the mere absence of a preventing cause : it was 

 simply equivalent to his non-existence. From nothing, from 

 a mere negation, no consequences can proceed. All effects are 

 connected, by the law of causation, with some set of positive 

 conditions ; negative ones, it is true, being almost always 

 required in addition. In other words, every fact or phenome- 

 non which has a beginning, invariably arises when some certain 

 combination of positive facts exists, provided certain other 

 positive facts do not exist. 



There is, no doubt, a tendency (which our first example, 

 that of death from taking a particular food, sufficiently illus- 

 trates) to associate the idea of causation with the proximate 

 antecedent event, rather than with any of the antecedent states, 

 or permanent facts, which may happen also to be conditions 

 of the phenomenon ; the reason being that the event not only 

 exists, but begins to exist immediately previous ; while the 

 other conditions may have pre-existed for an indefinite time. 

 And this tendency shows itself very visibly in the different 

 logical fictions which are resorted to, even by men of science, 

 to avoid the necessity of giving the name of cause to anything 

 which had existed for an indeterminate length of time before 

 the effect. Thus, rather than say that the earth causes the fall 

 of bodies, they ascribe it to a force exerted by the earth, or an 

 attraction by the earth, abstractions which they can represent 

 to themselves as exhausted by each effort, and therefore con- 

 stituting at each successive instant a fresh fact, simultaneous 

 with, or only immediately preceding, the effect. Inasmuch as 

 the coming of the circumstance which completes the assemblage 

 of conditions, is a change or event, it thence happens that an 

 event is always the antecedent in closest apparent proximity 

 to the consequent : and this may account for the illusion which 

 disposes us to look upon the proximate event as standing more 

 peculiarly in the position of a cause than any of the antecedent 

 states. But even this peculiarity, of being in closer proximity 

 to the effect than any other of its conditions, is, as we have 

 already seen, far from being necessary to the common notion 

 of a cause ; with which notion, on the contrary, any one of the 

 VOL. i. 24 



