LAW OF CAUSATION. 399 



antecedents under the denomination of Cause, calling 

 the others merely Conditions. Thus if a man eats of a 

 particular dish, and dies in consequence, that is, 

 would not have died if he had not eaten of it, people 

 would be apt to say that eating of that dish was the 

 cause of his death. There needs not, however, he 

 any invariable connexion between eating of the dish 

 and death ; but there certainly is, among the circum- 

 stances which took place, some combination or other 

 upon which death is invariably consequent : as, for 

 instance, the act of eating of the dish, combined with 

 a particular bodily constitution, a particular state of 

 present health, and perhaps even a certain state of the 

 atmosphere ; the whole of which circumstances per- 

 haps constituted in this particular case the conditions 

 of the phenomenon, or in other words the set of 

 antecedents which determined it, and but for which it 

 would not have happened. The real Cause, is the 

 whole of these antecedents ; and we have, philoso- 

 phically speaking, no right to give the name of cause 

 to one of them, exclusively of the others. What, in 

 the case we have supposed, disguises the incorrectness 

 of the expression, is this : that the various conditions, 

 except the single one of eating the food, were not 

 events (that is, instantaneous changes, or successions 

 of instantaneous changes) but states, possessing more 

 or less of permanency ; and might therefore have 

 preceded the effect by an indefinite length of duration, 

 for want of the event which was requisite to complete 

 the required concurrence of conditions : while as soon 

 as that event, eating the food, occurs, no other cause 

 is waited for, but the effect begins immediately to 

 take place : and hence the appearance is presented of 

 a more immediate and closer connexion between the 

 effect and that one antecedent, than between the effect 



