244 INDUCTION. 



things relatively to each other — the wall and the paint. In the example of 

 the molding influences on the human mind, its being a collocation at all is 

 only conjectural; for, even on the materialistic hypothesis, it would remain 

 to be proved that the increased facility with which the brain sums up a 

 column of figures when it has been long trained to calculation, is the result 

 of a permanent new arrangement of some of its material particles. We 

 must, therefore, content ourselves with what we know, and must include 

 among the effects of causes, the capacities given to objects of being causes 

 of other effects. This capacity is not a real thing existing in the objects ; 

 it is but a name for our conviction that they will act in a particular man- 

 ner when certain new circumstances arise. We may invest this assurance 

 of future events with a fictitious objective existence, by calling it a state of 

 the object. But unless the state consists, as in the case of the gunpowder 

 it does, in a collocation of particles, it expresses no present fact ; it is but 

 the contingent future fact brought back under another name. 



It may be thought that this form of causation requires us to admit an 

 exception to the doctrine that the conditions of a phenomenon — the ante- 

 cedents required for calling it into existence — must all be found among the 

 facts immediately, not remotely, preceding its commencement. But what 

 we have arrived at is not a correction, it is only an explanation, of that doc- 

 trine. In the enumeration of the conditions required for the occurrence of 

 any phenomenon, it always has to be included that objects must be present, 

 possessed of given properties. It is a condition of the phenomenon explo- 

 sion that an object should be present, of one or other of certain kinds, 

 which for that reason are called explosive. The presence of one of these 

 objects is a condition immediately pi-ecedent to the explosion. The condi- 

 tion which is not immediately precedent is the cause which produced, not 

 the explosion, but the explosive property. The conditions of the explosion 

 itself were all present immediately before it took place, and the general law, 

 therefore, remains intact. 



§ 6. It now remains to advert to a distinction which is of first-rate im- 

 portance both for clearing up the notion of cause, and for obviating a very 

 specious objection often made against the view which we have taken of the 

 subject. 



When we define the cause of any thing (in the only sense in which the 

 present inquiry has any concern with causes) to be "the antecedent which 

 it invariably follows," we do not use this phrase as exactly synonymous 

 with " the antecedent which it invariably has followed in our past expe- 

 rience." Such a mode of conceiving causation would be liable to the ob- 

 jection very plausibly urged by Dr. Reid, namely, that according to this 

 doctrine night must be the cause of day, and day the cause of night ; since 

 these phenomena have invariably succeeded one another from the begin- 

 ning of the world. But it is necessary to our using the word cause, that 

 we should believe not only that the antecedent always has been followed by 

 the consequent, but that, as long as the present constitution of things* en- 

 dures, it always will be so. And this would not be true of day and night. 

 We do not believe that night will be followed by day under all imaginable 

 circumstances, but only that it will be so provided the sun rises above the 



* I mean by this expression, the ultimate laws of nature (whatever they may be) as distin- 

 guished from the derivative laws and from the collocations. The diurnal revolution of the 

 earth (for example) is not a part of the constitution of things, because nothing can be so called 

 which might possibly be terminated or altered by natural causes. 



