Chauncey Wright. 89 



tify to what has happened already, and, so far as 

 experience goes, you have n't an iota of warrant 

 for your belief that the sun will rise to-morrow 

 morning. Your trust in the constancy of Nature 

 must be derived, therefore, from some principle 

 inherent in the very constitution of your mind, 

 implanted there by the Creator for a wise and 

 beneficent purpose. 



Once this transcendentalist argument was 

 thought to have great weight, but of late years 

 it has fallen irredeemably into discredit. For to- 

 day the empiricist retorts with crushing effect 

 that, precisely because we are wholly dependent 

 on experience, and have no other quarter to go to 

 for rules of belief and conduct, we cannot apply 

 to the future any other rules of probability than 

 those with which our experience of the past has 

 furnished us. If we had any criterion of belief 

 independent of experience, then we might perhaps 

 be able to believe that on the earth a million 

 years hence, or on Mars to-day, a piece of red-hot 

 iron would not burn the hand. Were we not 

 strictly hampered by experience, we might doubt 

 the universality of causation. But being thus 

 strictly hampered, we must either imagine the 

 future under the same rules as those under which 

 we remember the past, or else subside in a kind 



