404 INDUCTION. 



antecedent states, or permanent facts, which may 

 happen also to be conditions of the phenomenon ; the 

 reason being that the event not only exists, but begins 

 to exist immediately previous ; while the other con- 

 ditions may have preexisted for an indefinite time. 

 And this tendency shows itself very visibly in the dif- 

 ferent logical fictions which are resorted to even by 

 philosophers, to avoid the necessity of giving the name 

 of cause to anything which had existed for an indeter- 

 minate length of time before the effect. Thus, rather 

 than say that the earth causes the fall of bodies, 

 they ascribe it to a force exerted by the earth, or an 

 attraction by the earth, abstractions which they can 

 represent to themselves as exhausted by each effort, 

 and therefore constituting at each successive instant a 

 fresh fact, simultaneous with, or only immediately pre- 

 ceding, the effect. Inasmuch as the coming of the 

 circumstance which completes the assemblage of con- 

 ditions, is a change or event, it thence happens that 

 an event is always the antecedent in closest apparent 

 proximity to the consequent : and this may account for 

 the illusion which disposes us to look upon the proxi- 

 mate event as standing more peculiarly in the position 

 of a cause than any of the antecedent states. But even 

 this peculiarity, of being in closer proximity to the effect 

 than any other of its conditions, is. as we have already 

 seen, far from being necessary to the common notion 

 of a cause ; with which notion, on the contrary, any 

 one of the conditions, either positive or negative, is 

 found, upon occasion, completely to accord. 



The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the 

 sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, 

 taken together ; the whole of the contingencies of 

 every description, which being realized, the conse- 

 quent invariably follows. The negative conditions, 



