EVIDENCE OF UNIVEKSAL CAUSATION. 399 



do, since the human faculties are all which any one has to judge by; and 

 inasmuch as the meaning of the word evidence is supposed to be, something 

 which when laid before the mind, induces it to believe ; to demand evidence 

 when the belief is insured by the mind's own laws, is supposed to be ap- 

 pealing to the intellect against the intellect. But this, I apprehend, is a 

 misunderstanding of the nature of evidence. By evidence is not meant 

 any thing and evei'y thing which produces belief. There are many things 

 which generate belief besides evidence. A mere strong association of ideas 

 often causes a belief so intense as to be unshakable by experience or argu- 

 ment. Evidence is not that which the mind does or must yield to, but 

 that which it ought to yield to, namely, that, by yielding to which its belief 

 is kept conformable to fact. There is no appeal from the human faculties 

 generally, but there is an appeal from one human faculty to another; from 

 the judging faculty, to those which take cognizance of fact, the faculties of 

 sense and consciousness. The legitimacy of this appeal is admitted when- 

 ever it is allowed that our judgments ought to be conformable to fact. 

 To say that belief suffices for its own justification is making opinion the 

 test of opinion ; it is denying the existence of any outward standard, the 

 conformity of an opinion to wdiich constitutes its truth. We call one mode 

 of forming opinions right and another wrong, because the one does, and the 

 other does not, tend to make the opinion agree with the fact — to make 

 people believe what really is, and expect what really will be. Now a mere 

 disposition to believe, even if supposed instinctive, is no guarantee for the 

 truth of the thing believed. If, indeed, the belief ever amounted to an ir- 

 resistible necessity, there would then be no use in appealing from it, be- 

 cause there would be no possibility of altering it. But even then the truth 

 of the belief would not follow; it would only follow that mankind were 

 under a jaermanent necessity of believing what might possibly not be true; 

 in other words, that a case might occur in which our senses or conscious- 

 ness, if they could be appealed to, might testify one thing, and our reason 

 believe another. But in fact there is no such permanent necessity. There 

 is no proposition of which it can be asserted that every human mind must 

 eternally and irrevocably believe it. Many of the propositions of which 

 this is most confidently stated, great numbers of human beings have disbe- 

 lieved. The things which it has been supposed that nobody could possibly 

 help believing, are innumerable ; but no two generations would make out 

 the same catalogue of them. One age or nation believes implicitly what 

 to another seems incredible and inconceivable; one individual has not a 

 vestige of a belief which another deems to be absolutely inherent in hu- 

 manity. There is not one of these supposed instinctive beliefs which is 

 really inevitable. It is in the power of eveiy one to cultivate habits of 

 thought which make him independent of them. The habit of philosoph- 

 ical analysis (of which it is the surest effect to enable the mind to command, 

 instead of being commanded by, the laws of the merely passive part of its 

 own nature), by showing to us that things are not necessarily connected in 

 fact because their ideas are connected in our minds, is able to loosen innu- 

 merable associations which reign despotically over the undisciplined or 

 early -prejudiced mind. And this habit is not without power even over 

 those associations which the school of which I have been speaking regard 

 as connate and instinctive. I am convinced that any one accustomed to 

 abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, 

 will, when his imagination has once learned to entertain the notion, find 

 no difficulty in conceiving that in some one, for instance, of the many fii'- 



