EVIDENCE OF UNIVERSAL CAUSATION. 405 



Lightning might once have been supposed to obey no laws; but since it 

 has been ascertained to be identical with electricity, we know that the very 

 same phenomenon in some of its manifestations is implicitly obedient to the 

 action of fixed causes. I do not believe that there is now one object or 

 event in all our experience of nature, within the bounds of the solar system 

 at least, which has not either been ascertained by direct observation to fol- 

 low laws of its own, or been proved to be closely similar to objects and 

 events which, in more familiar manifestations, or on a more limited scale, 

 follow strict laws ; our inability to trace the same laws on a larger scale and 

 in the more recondite instances, being accounted for by the number and 

 complication of the modifying causes, or by their inaccessibility to observa- 

 tion. 



The progress of experience, therefore, has dissipated the doubt which 

 must have rested on the universality of the law of causation while there 

 were phenomena which seemed to be sui generis, not subject to the same 

 laws with any other class of phenomena, and not as yet ascertained to have 

 peculiar laws of their own. This great generalization, however, might rea- 

 sonably have been, as it in fact was, acted on as a probability of the high- 

 est order, before there were suflScient grounds for receiving it as a certainty. 

 In matters of evidence, as in all other human things, we neither I'equire, nor 

 can attain, the absolute. We must hold even our strongest convictions 

 with an opening left in our minds for the reception of facts which contra- 

 dict them ; and only when we have taken this precaution, have we earned 

 the right to act upon our convictions with complete confidence when no 

 such contradiction appears. Whatever has been found true in innumerable 

 instances, and never found to be false after due examination in any, we are 

 safe in acting on as universal provisionally, until an undoubted exception 

 appears ; provided the nature of the case be such that a real exception 

 could scarcely have escaped notice. When every phenomenon that we ever 

 knew sufficiently well to be able to answer the question, had a cause on 

 which it was invariably consequent, it was more rational to suppose that 

 our inability to assign the causes of other phenomena arose from our igno- 

 rance, than that there were phenomena which were uncaused, and which 

 happened to be exactly those which we had hitherto had no sufficient op- 

 portunity of studying. 



It must, at the same time, be remarked, that the reasons for this reliance 

 do not hold in circumstances unknown to us, and beyond the possible range 

 of our experience. In distant parts of the stellar regions, where the phe- 

 nomena may be entirely unlike those with which we are acquainted, it 

 would be folly to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, any more 

 than those special ones which we have found to hold universally on our 

 own planet. The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise called 

 the law of causation, must be received not as a law of the universe, but of 

 that portion of it only which is within the range of our means of sure ob- 

 servation, with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases. To ex- 

 tend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, and to which, in 

 the absence of any ground from experience for estimating its degree of 

 probability, it would be idle to attempt to assign any.* 



* One of the most rising thinkers of the new generation in France, M. Taine (who has 

 given, in the Bevue des Deux Mondes, the most masterly analysis, at least in one point of 

 view, ever made of the present work), though he rejects, on this and similar points of psy- 

 chology, the intuition theory in its ordinary form, nevertheless assigns to the law of causation, 

 and to some other of the most imiversal laws, that certainty beyond the bounds of human esr 



