Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. 87 



The relation of cause and effect consists merely in the 

 succession of our impressions and ideas. The sequence is 

 ideal and its order has become established by a habit of ex- 

 pectation derived from many and frequent experiences of a 

 definite succession of impressions. Thus the sight of a flame 

 having been uniformly followed by the feeling of heat, this 

 feeling will always in the future arise vividly whenever and 

 wherever a flame is seen. The connection of cause and effect 

 is therefore only ideal, having no relation to an invariable 

 permanent objective order, being only a subjective bond be- 

 tween the transitory particulars of sense and their reflected 

 remembrance. 



Besides the fundamental distinction between causal con- 

 nection and logical connection implied in Hume's argumen- 

 tation, the derivation of all ideas from sensorial experience 

 purely experiential links forming the connection between 

 these data of knowledge gave rise to what is known as 

 English experientialism, or the association philosophy. The 

 aim of this philosophical method is to discover the general 

 laws that govern the association of ideas experientially de- 

 rived, and to show that all our complex ideas are formed by 

 association of experienced particulars, in accordance with 

 those general laws. 



It was Hume's elucidation of the process of matter-of-fact 

 experience that awakened Kant from the " dogmatic slum- 

 ber " into which he had been rocked by the purely logical 

 or deductive philosophy of the Leibnitz- Wolffian school, 

 " leading him," as Dr. Edmund Montgomery says, " to dis- 

 cover the enchanted path traveled by so many since, on 

 which the charmed wanderer is carried, far away from real 

 nature, to the mystic realm of transcendental idealism." By 

 this school of thought it has been taken for granted incon- 

 testably that the general ideas or so-called concepts, found 

 ready-made in our mind when we begin to philosophize, are 

 eternal and universal verities implanted in us independently 

 of all external experience, and that our understanding of 

 truth is arrived at solely by deriving it from these pre-exist- 

 ing concepts by means of syllogistic reasoning. 



Kant was the first fully to appreciate the important im- 

 plications involved in Hume's experiential derivation of all 

 knowledge ; for if there is really no other way of arriving 

 at the knowledge of truth than that of accepting it as it 

 comes to us in sensorial experience, and if the knowledge of 

 such truth consists simply in an experienced connection of 



