LAW OF CAUSATION. 263 



phenomena and mine conform to the same laws, and it is for this reason 

 that I believe both to arise from a similar cause. Accordingly I do not 

 extend the conclusion beyond the grounds for it. Earth, fire, mountains, 

 trees, are remarkable agencies, but their phenomena do not conform to the 

 same laws as my actions do, and I therefore do not believe earth or fire, 

 mountains or trees, to possess animal life. But the supporters of the Voli- 

 tion Theory ask us to infer that volition causes every thing, for no reason 

 except that it causes one particular thing ; although that one phenomenon, 

 far from being a type of all natural phenomena, is eminently peculiar ; its 

 laws bearing scarcely any resemblance to those of any other phenomenon, 

 whether of inorganic or of organic nature. 



NOTE SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTER. 



The author of the Second Burnett Prize Essay (Dr. Tulloch), who has employed a consid- 

 erable number of pages in controverting the doctrines of the preceding chapter, has somewhat 

 surprised me by denying a fact, which I imagined too well known to require proof — that there 

 have been philosophers who found in physical explanations of phenomena the same complete 

 mental satisfaction which we are told is only given by volitional explanation, and others who 

 denied the Volitional Theory on the same ground of inconceivability on which it is defended. 

 The assertion of the Essayist is countersigned still more positively by an able reviewer of the 

 Essay:* "Two illustrations," says the reviewer, "are advanced by Mr. Mill: the case of 

 Thales and Anaximenes, stated by him to have maintained, the one Moisture and the other 

 Air to be the origin of all things ; and that of Descartes and Leibnitz, whom he asserts to 

 have found the action of Mind upon Matter the grand inconceivability. In counter-statement 

 as to the first of these cases the author shows — what we believe now hardly admits of doubt 

 — that the Greek philosophers distinctly recognized as beyond and above their primal material 

 source, the vovc, or Divine Intelligence, as the efficient and originating Source of all ; and as 

 to the second, by proof that it was the mode, not theyhc^, of that action on matter, which was 

 represented as inconceivable." 



A greater quantity of historical eiTor has seldom been comprised in a single sentence. 

 With regard to Thales, the assertion that he considered water as a mere material in the hands 

 of voiif rests on a passage of Cicero de Naturd Deorum ; and whoever will refer to any of 

 the accurate historians of philosophy, will find that they treat this as a mere fancy of Cicero, 

 resting on no authority, opposed to all the evidence ; and make surmises as to the manner in 

 which Cicero may have been led into the error. (See Hitter, vol. i., p. 211, 2d ed. ; Brandis, 

 vol. i., pp. 118-9, 1st ed. ; Preller, Historia Pkilosophice Grceco- Romance, p. 10. "Schiefe 

 Ansicht, durchaus zu verwerfen ;" " augenscheinlich folgernd statt zu berichten ;" "quibus 

 vera sententia Thaletis plane detorquetur," are the expressions of these writers.) As for An- 

 aximenes, he even according to Cicero, maintained, not that air was the material out of which 

 God made the world, but that the air was a god : "Anaximenes aera deum statuit ;" or, ac- 

 cording to St. Augustine, that it was the material out of which the gods were made ; " non 

 tamen ab ipsis [Diis] aerem factum, sed ipsos ex acre ortos credidit." Those who are not fa- 

 miliar with the metaphysical terminology of antiquity, must not be misled by finding it stated 

 that Anaximenes attributed i/^jv (translated soul, or life) to his universal element, the air. 

 The Greek philosophers acknowledged several kinds of if'vx^ the nutritive, the sensitive, and 

 the intellective.! Even the moderns, with admitted correctness, attribute life to plants. As 

 far as we can make out the meaning of Anaximenes, he made choice of Air as the universal 

 agent, on the ground that it is perpetually in motion, without any apparent cause external to 

 itself: so that he conceived it as exercising spontaneous force, and as the principle of life and 

 activity in all things, men and gods inclusive. If this be not representing it as the Efficient 

 Cause the dispute altogether has no meaning. 



If either Anaximenes, or Thales, or any of their contemporaries, had held the doctrine that 

 vovc was the Efficient Cause, that doctrine could not have been reputed, as it was throughout 

 antiquity, to have originated with Anaxagoras. The testimony of Aristotle, in the first book 

 of his Metaphysics, is perfectly decisive with respect to these early speculations. After enu- 

 merating four kinds of causes, or rather four different meanings of the word Cause, viz., the 

 Essence of a thing, the Matter of it, the Origin of Motion (Efficient Cause), and the End or 



* Westminster Review for October, 1855. 



t See the whole doctrine in Aristotle de Anima, where the dpenTiKfj tpvxf/ is treated as 

 exactly equivalent to dpsKTiK^ dijva/xig. 



