LAW OF CAUSATION. 259 



" As philosophy advances, life and activity in natural objects retires, and 

 leaves them dead and inactive. Instead of moving voluntarily, we find 

 them to be moved necessarily ; instead of acting, we find them to be acted 

 upon ; and Nature appears as one great machine, where one wheel is turn- 

 ed by another, that by a third ; and how far this necessary succession may 

 reach, the philosopher does not know."* 



There is, then, a spontaneous tendency of the intellect to account to it- 

 self for all cases of causation by assimilating them to the intentional acts 

 of voluntary agents like itself. This is the instinctive philosophy of the 

 human mind in its earliest stage, before it has become familiar with any 

 other invariable sequences than those between its own volitions or those 

 of other human beings and their voluntary acts. As the notion of fixed 

 laws of succession among external phenomena gradually establishes itself, 

 the propensity to refer all phenomena to voluntary agency slowly gives 

 way before it. The suggestions, however, of daily life continuing to be 

 more powei'ful than those of scientific thought, the original instinctive phi- 

 losophy maintains its ground in the mind, underneath the growths obtain- 

 ed by cultivation, and keeps up a constant resistance to their throwing 

 their roots deep into the soil. The theory against which I am contend- 

 ing derives its nourishment from that substratum. Its strength does not 

 lie in argument, but in its afiinity to an obstinate tendency of the infancy 

 of the human mind. 



That this tendency, however, is not the result of an inherent mental law, 

 is proved by superabundant evidence. The history of science, from its 

 earhest dawn, shows that mankind have not been unanimous in thinking 

 either that the action of matter lipon matter was not conceivable, or that 

 the action of mind upon matter was. To some thinkers, and some schools 

 of thinkers, both in ancient and in modern times, this last has appeared 

 much more inconceivable than the former. Sequences entirely physical 

 and material, as soon as they had become sufficiently familiar to the human 

 mind, came to be thought perfectly natural, and were regarded not only as 

 needing no explanation themselves, but as being capable of affording it to 

 others, and even of serving as the ultimate explanation of things in gen- 

 eral. 



One of the ablest recent supporters of the Volitional theory has furnish- 

 ed an explanation, at once historically true and philosophically acute, of 

 the failure of the Greek philosophers in physical inquiry, in which, as I 

 conceive, he unconsciously depicts his own state of mind. " Their stum- 

 bling - block was one as to the nature of the evidence they had to expect 



for their conviction They had not seized the idea that they must not 



expect to understand the processes of outward causes, but only their re- 

 sults ; and consequently, the whole physical philosophy of the Greeks was 

 an attempt to identify mentally the effect with its cause, to feel after some 

 not only necessary but natural connection, where they meant by natural 

 that which would per se carry some presumption to their own mind. 

 .... They wanted to see some reason why the physical antecedent should 

 produce this particular consequent, and their only attempts were in direc- 

 tions where they could find such reasons."f In other words, they were 

 not content merely to know that one phenomenon was always followed by 

 another ; they thought that they had not attained the true aim of science, 

 unless they could perceive something in the nature of the one phenomenon 



* Reid's Essays on the Active Powers, Essay iv. , chap. 3. 

 + Prospective Review for Febraary, 1850. 



I 



