382 INDUCTION. 



perishes and is perpetually renewed as long as the necessary 

 conditions subsist. If we adopt this language we avoid the 

 necessity of admitting that the continuance of the cause is 

 ever required to maintain the effect. We may say, it is not 

 required to maintain, but to reproduce, the effect, or else to 

 counteract some force tending to destroy it. And this may be 

 a convenient phraseology. But it is only a phraseology. The 

 fact remains, that in some cases (though these are a minority) 

 the continuance of the conditions which produced an effect is 

 necessary to the continuance of the effect. 



As to the ulterior question, whether it is strictly necessary 

 that the cause, or assemblage of conditions, should precede, 

 by ever so short an instant, the production of the effect, (a 

 question raised and argued with much ingenuity by Sir John 

 Herschel in an Essay already quoted,*) the inquiry is of no 

 consequence for our present purpose. There certainly are 

 cases in which the effect follows without any interval per- 

 ceptible by our faculties ; and when there is an interval, we 

 cannot tell by how many intermediate links imperceptible to 

 us that interval may really be filled up. But even granting 

 that an effect may commence simultaneously with its cause, 

 the view I have taken of causation is in no way practically 

 affected. Whether the cause and its effect be necessarily suc- 

 cessive or not, the beginning of a phenomenon is what implies 

 a cause, and causation is the law of the succession of phe- 

 nomena. If these axioms be granted, we can afford, though 

 I see no necessity for doing so, to drop the words antecedent 

 and consequent as applied to cause and effect. I have no 

 objection to define a cause, the assemblage of phenomena, 

 which occurring, some other phenomenon invariably com- 

 mences, or has its origin. Whether the effect coincides in 

 point of time with, or immediately follows, the hindmost of its 

 conditions, is immaterial. At all events it does not precede 

 it ; and when we are in doubt, between two coexistent phe- 

 nomena, which is cause and which effect, we rightly deem the 

 question solved if we can ascertain which of them preceded 

 the other. 



* Essays, pp. 206-208. 



