338 FALLACIES. 



supposition that no one property which is true of the effect 

 might be true of the cause. Without going quite so far in 

 point of expression, Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria* 

 affirms as an " evident truth," that " the law of causality 

 holds only between homogeneous things, i. e. things having 

 some common property," and therefore " cannot extend from 

 one world into another, its opposite :" hence, as mind and 

 matter have no common property, mind cannot act upon 

 matter, nor matter upon mind. What is this but the d priori 

 fallacy of which we are speaking ? The doctrine, like many 

 others of Coleridge, is taken from Spinoza, in the first book of 

 whose Ethica (De Deo) it stands as the Third Proposition, 

 " Quse res nihil commune inter se habent, earum una alterius 

 causa esse non potest," and is there proved from two so-called 

 axioms, equally gratuitous with itself: but Spinoza, ever 

 systematically consistent, pursued the doctrine to its inevitable 

 consequence, the materiality of God. 



The same conception of impossibility led the ingenious 

 and subtle mind of Leibnitz to his celebrated doctrine of a 

 pre-established harmony. He, too, thought that mind could 

 not act upon matter, nor matter upon mind, and that the two, 

 therefore, must have been arranged by their Maker like two 

 clocks, which, though unconnected with one another, strike 

 simultaneously, and always point to the same hour. Male- 

 branche's equally famous theory of Occasional Causes was 

 another form of the same conception : instead of supposing 

 the clocks originally arranged to strike together, he held that 

 when the one strikes, God interposes, and makes the other 

 strike in correspondence with it. 



Descartes, in like manner, whose works are a rich mine of 

 almost every description of d priori fallacy, says that the 

 Efficient Cause must at least have all the perfections of the 

 effect, and for this singular reason : " Si enim ponamus aliquid 

 in idea reperiri quod non fuerit in ejus causa, hoc igitur habet 

 a nihilo ;" of which it is scarcely a parody to say, that if there 



* Vol. i. chap. 8. 



