374 INDUCTION. 



the mere verbal incongruity. We might say that the stone 

 moves towards the earth by the properties of the matter com- 

 posing it ; and according to this mode of presenting the 

 phenomenon, the stone itself might without impropriety be 

 called the agent ; though, to save the established doctrine 

 of the inactivity of matter, men usually prefer here also to 

 ascribe the effect to an occult quality, and say that the cause 

 is not the stone itself, but the weight or gravitation of the 

 stone. 



Those who have contended for a radical distinction be- 

 tween agent and patient, have generally conceived the agent 

 as that which causes some state of, or some change in the 

 state of, another object which is called the patient. But 

 a little reflection will show that the licence we assume of 

 speaking of phenomena as states of the various objects which 

 take part in them, (an artifice of which so much use has been 

 made by some philosophers, Brown in particular, for the appa- 

 rent explanation of phenomena,) is simply a sort of logical 

 fiction, useful sometimes as one among several modes of 

 expression, but which should never be supposed to be the 

 enunciation of a scientific truth. Even those attributes of 

 an object which might seem with greatest propriety to be 

 called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities, its" 

 colour, hardness, shape, and the like, are in reality (as no 

 one has pointed out more clearly than Brown himself) 

 phenomena of causation, in which the substance is distinctly 

 the agent, or producing cause, the patient being our own 

 organs, and those of other sentient beings. What we call 

 states of objects, are always sequences into which the 

 objects enter, generally as antecedents or causes ; and things 

 are never more active than in the production of those phe- 

 nomena in which they are said to be acted upon. Thus, 

 in the example of a stone falling to the earth, according to 

 the theory of gravitation the stone is as much an agent as 

 the earth, which not only attracts, but is itself attracted by, 

 the stone. In the case of a sensation produced in our organs, 

 the laws of our organization, and even those of our minds, are 

 as directly operative in determining the effect produced, as the 



