FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 337 



motion ; meaning of course not the feeling of heat, but the 

 conditions of the feeling; meaning, therefore, only that 

 wherever there is heat, there must first he a particular kind of 

 motion ; but he makes no distinction in his language between 

 these two ideas, expressing himself as if heat, and the con- 

 ditions of heat, were one and the same thing. So Darwin, in 

 the beginning of his Zoonomia, says, "The word idea has 

 various meanings in the writers of metaphysic : it is here 

 used simply for those notions of external things which our 

 organs of sense bring us acquainted with originally," (thus 

 far the proposition, though vague, is unexceptionable in 

 meaning,) " and is defined a contraction, a motion, or con- 

 figuration, of the fibres which constitute the immediate organ 

 of sense." Our notions, a configuration of the fibres ! What 

 kind of logician must he be who thinks that a phenomenon 

 is defined to be the condition on which he supposes it to 

 depend ? Accordingly he says soon after, not that our ideas 

 are caused by, or consequent on, certain organic phenomena, 

 but " our ideas are animal motions of the organs of sense." 

 And this confusion runs through the four volumes of the 

 Zoonomia; the reader never knows whether the writer is 

 speaking of the effect, or of its supposed cause ; of the idea, a 

 state of mental consciousness, or of the state of the nerves and 

 brain which he considers it to presuppose. 



I have given a variety of instances in which the natural 

 prejudice, that causes and their effects must resemble one 

 another, has operated in practice so as to give rise to serious 

 errors. I shall now go further, and produce from writings 

 even of the present or very recent times, instances in which 

 this prejudice is laid down as an established principle. M. 

 Victor Cousin, in the last of his celebrated lectures on Locke, 

 enunciates the maxim in the following unqualified terms. 

 "Tout ce qui est vrai de 1'effet est vrai de la cause." A doc- 

 trine to which, unless in some peculiar and technical mean- 

 ing of the words cause and effect, it is not to be imagined 

 that any person would literally adhere : but he who could so 

 write must be far enough from seeing, that the very reverse 

 might be the fact; that there is nothing impossible in the 

 VOL. ii. 22 



