THE MECHANISM OF NATURE 299 



as we could not ignore it in our actions if we would without 

 suffering the consequences ; although belief in universal causation 

 does not seem to be necessary, for we find men who think they 

 are quite able to believe in luck or chance, as in the fall of dice, 

 and others who hold that our own rational actions are no part 

 of the order of nature. 



It is clear, however, that, as living beings, we are compelled, 

 by our nature, to respond to the law of causation or take the 

 consequences, and that in this sense the law is necessary to man 

 as man just as food and drink are necessary; but as it by no 

 means follows that we are to have food and drink, or that a man 

 may not starve himself, so it may not follow that, because confidence 

 in causation is organic and natural, the external relations to which 

 we respond are fixed or necessary. 



The responses to causation which are part of our nature as 

 living men are continually verified and amplified and perfected and 

 corrected by new experience with every hour of our existence, 

 until old age is inclined to suspect that experience has nothing 

 new to offer; but the support which individual experience gives 

 to this law is as nothing in comparison with that which we find 

 in the annals of scientific progress, — in the systematic observa- 

 tions and controlled experiments which make up that organized 

 and orderly summary of the experience of generation after gener- 

 ation which is now the common stock of all educated men. 



" A single book tells us more than Methuselah could have 

 learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years 

 in learning. When apparent disorders are found to be only the 

 recurrent pulses of a slow-working order, and the wonder of the 

 year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and 

 minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes 

 and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built on our 

 faith in its continuity, — the belief that the chain has never been 

 broken and will never be broken becomes one of the strongest 

 and most justifiable of human convictions." ^ 



To admit that response to causation is part of our human 

 constitution is one thing, but it is quite another matter to assert 

 that we know why one event must, or even that it must, be 



1 Huxley, "Hume," p. 153. 



