396 



INDUCTION. 



account better for the phenomena of nature than a mere refe- 

 rence to divine volition.* 



Again, and conversely, the action of mind upon matter 

 (which, we are now told, not only needs no explanation itself, 

 but is the explanation of all other effects), has appeared to 

 some thinkers to be itself the grand inconceivability. It was 

 to get over this very difficulty that the Cartesians invented the 

 system of Occasional Causes. They could not conceive that 

 thoughts in a mind could produce movements in a body, or 

 that bodily movements could produce thoughts. They could 

 see no necessary connexion, no relation a priori, between a 

 motion and a thought. And as the Cartesians, more than any 

 other school of philosophical speculation before or since, made 

 their own minds the measure of all things, and refused, on 

 principle, to believe that Nature had done what they were 

 unable to see any reason why she must do, they affirmed it to 

 be impossible that a material and a mental fact could be causes 

 one of another. They regarded them as mere Occasions on 

 which the real agent, God, thought fit to exert his power as a 

 Cause. When a man wills to move his foot, it is not his will 

 that moves it, but God (they said) moves it on the occasion of 

 his will. God, according to this system, is the only efficient 

 cause, not qua mind, or qua endowed with volition, but qua 

 omnipotent. This hypothesis was, as I said, originally sug- 

 gested by the supposed inconceivability of any real mutual 

 action between Mind and Matter : but it was afterwards 

 extended to the action of Matter upon Matter, for on a nicer 

 examination they found this inconceivable too, and therefore, 

 according to their logic, impossible. The deus ex machind 

 was ultimately called in to produce a spark on the occasion of 

 a flint and steel coming together, or to break an egg on the 

 occasion of its falling on the ground. 



All this, undoubtedly, shows that it is the disposition of 

 mankind in general, not to be satisfied with knowing that one 

 fact is invariably antecedent and another consequent, but to look 

 out for something which may seem to explain their being so. 

 But we also see that this demand may be completely satisfied 



* Vide supra, p. 270, note. 



