242 INDUCTION. 



to which, in common parlance, the terra cause is more readily and frequent- 

 ly awarded, so there are others to which it is, in ordinary circumstances, 

 refused. In most cases of causation a distinction is commonly drawn be- 

 tween something which acts, and some other thing which is acted upon ; 

 between an agent and 2i patient. Both of these, it would be universally al- 

 lowed, are conditions of the phenomenon ; but it would be thought absurd 

 to call the latter the cause, that title being reserved for the former. The 

 distinction, however, vanishes on examination, or rather is found to be only 

 verbal ; arising from an incident of mere expression, namely, that the ob- 

 ject said to be acted upon, and which is considered as the scene in which 

 the effect takes place, is commonly included in the phrase by which the ef- 

 fect is spoken of, so that if it were also reckoned as part of the cause, the 

 seeming incongruity would arise of its being supposed to cause itself. In 

 the instance which we have already had, of falling bodies, the question was 

 thus put : What is the cause which makes a stone fall ? and if the answer 

 had been " the stone itself," the expression would have been in apparent 

 contradiction to the meaning of the word cause. The stone, therefore, is 

 conceived as the patient, and the earth (or, according to the common and 

 most unphilosophical practice, an occult quality of the earth) is represented 

 as the agent or cause. But that there is nothing fundamental in the dis- 

 tinction may be seen from this, that it is quite possible to conceive the 

 stone as causing its own fall, provided the language employed be such as 

 to save the mere verbal incongruity. We might say that the stone moves 

 toward the earth by the properties of the matter composing it; and ac- 

 cording to this mode of presenting the phenomenon, the stone itself might 

 without impropriety be called the agent ; though, to save the established 

 doctrine of the inactivity of matter, men usually prefer here also to ascribe 

 the effect to an occult quality, and say that the cause is not the stone itself, 

 but the weight or gravitation of the stone. 



Those who have contended for a radical distinction between agent and 

 patient, have generally conceived the agent as that which causes some state 

 of, or some change in the state of, another object which is called the pa- 

 tient. But a little reflection will show that the license we assume of speak- 

 ing of phenomena as states of the various objects which take part in them 

 (an artifice of which so much use has been made by some philosophers, 

 Brown in particular, for the apparent explanation of phenomena), is sim- 

 ply a sort of logical fiction, useful sometimes as one among several modes 

 of expression, but which should never be supposed to be the enunciation 

 of a scientific truth. Even those attributes of an object which might 

 seem with greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sen- 

 sible qualities, its color, hardness, shape, and the like, are in reality (as no 

 one has pointed out more clearly than Brown himself) phenomena of cau- 

 sation, in which the substance is distinctly the agent, or producing cause, 

 the patient being our own organs, and those of other sentient beings. 

 What we call states of objects, are always sequences into which the objects 

 enter, generally as antecedents or causes ; and things are never more active 

 than in the production of those phenomena in which they are said to be 

 acted upon. Thus, in the example of a stone falling to the earth, according 

 to the theory of gravitation the stone is as much an agent as the earth, 

 which not only attracts, but is itself attracted by, the stone. In the case of 

 a sensation produced in our organs, the laws of our organization, and even 

 those of our minds, are as directly operative in determining the effect pro- 

 duced, as the laws of the outward object. Though we call prussic acid 



