FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 537 



from writings even of tlie present or very recent times, instances in which 

 this prejudice is laid down as an established principle. M. Victor Cousin, 

 in the last of his celebrated lectures on Locke, enunciates the maxim in the 

 following unqualified terms : " Tout co qui est vrai de I'effet, est vrai de la 

 cause." A doctrine to which, unless in some peculiar and technical mean- 

 ing of the words cause and effect, it is not to be imagined that any person 

 would literally adhere ; but he who could so write must be far enough from 

 seeing that the very reverse might be the effect ; that there is nothing im- 

 possible in the supposition that no one property which is true of the effect 

 might be true of the cause. Without going quite so far in point of ex- 

 pression, Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria^ affirms as an " evident 

 truth," that " the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, 

 i. e., things having some common property," and therefore " can not extend 

 from one world into another, its opposite ;" hence, as mind and matter 

 have no common property, mind can not act upon matter, nor matter 

 upon mind. What is this but the a priori fallacy of which we are speak- 

 ing? The doctrine, like many others of Coleridge, is taken from Spinoza, 

 in the first book of whose Ethica {De Deo) it stands as the Third Propo- 

 sition, " Qua3 res nihil commune inter se habent, earum una alterius causa 

 esse non potest," and is there proved from two so-called axioms, equally 

 gratuitous with itself ; but Spinoza ever systematically consistent, pursued 

 the doctrine to its inevitable consequence, the materiality of God. 



The same conception of impossibility led the ingenious and subtle mind 

 of Leibnitz to his celebrated doctrine of a pre-established harmony. He, 

 too, thought that mind could not act upon matter, nor matter upon mind, 

 and that the two, therefore, must have been arranged by their Maker like 

 two clocks, which, though unconnected Avith one another, strike simultane- 

 ously, and always point to the same hour. Malebranche's equally famous 

 theory of Occasional Causes was another form of the same conception ; in- 

 stead of supposing the clocks originally arranged to strike together, he held 

 that when the one strikes, God interposes, and makes the other strike in 

 correspondence with it. 



Descartes, in like manner, whose works are a rich mine of almost every 

 description of a priori fallacy, says that the Efficient Cause must at least 

 have all the perfections of the effect, and for this singular reason : " Si enim 

 ponamus aliquid in idea reperiri quod non fuerit in ejus causa, hoc igitur 

 habet a nihilo ;" of which it is scarcely a parody to say, that if there be 

 pepper in the soup there must be pepper in the cook who made it, since 

 otherwise the pepper would be without a cause. A similar fallacy is com- 

 mitted by Cicero, in his second book De Finihus^ where, speaking in his 

 own person against the Epicureans, he charges them with inconsistency in 

 saying that the pleasures of the mind had their origin from those of the 

 body, and yet that the former were more valuable, as if the effect could sur- 

 pass the cause. "Animi voluptas oi'itur propter voluptatem corporis, et 

 major est animi voluptas quam corpoi-is? ita fit ut gratulator, laetior sit 

 quam is cui gratulatur." Even that, surely, is not an impossibility ; a per- 

 son's good fortune has often given more pleasure to others than it gave to 

 the person himself. 



Descartes, with no less readiness, applies the same principle the converse 

 way, and infers the nature of the effects from the assumption that they 

 must, in this or that property or in all their properties, resemble their 



* Vol. i., chap. 8. 



