408 INDUCTION. 



several modes of expression, but which should never 

 be supposed to be the statement of a philosophical 

 truth. Even those of the attributes of an object 

 which might seem with greatest propriety to be 

 called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities, 

 its colour, hardness, shape, and the like, are, in reality, 

 (as no one has pointed out more clearly than Brown 

 himself,) phenomena of causation, in which the sub- 

 stance is distinctly the agent, or producing cause, the 

 patient being our own organs, and those of other 

 sentient beings. What we call the states of objects, 

 are always sequences into which those objects enter, 

 generally as antecedents or causes ; and things are 

 never more active than in the production of those phe- 

 nomena in which they are said to be acted upon. 

 Thus, in the last example, that of a sensation pro- 

 duced in our organs, are not the laws of our organi- 

 zation, and even those of our minds, as directly ope- 

 rative in determining the effect produced, as the laws 

 of the outward object ? Though we call prussic acid 

 the agent of a man's death, are not the whole of the 

 vital and organic properties of the patient as actively 

 instrumental as the poison, in the chain of effects 

 which so rapidly terminates his sentient existence ? 

 In the process of education, we may call the teacher 

 the agent, and the scholar only the material acted 

 upon ; yet in truth all the facts which pre-existed 

 in the scholar's mind exert either co-operating or 

 counteracting agencies in relation to the teacher's 

 efforts. It is not light alone which is the agent in 

 vision, but light coupled with the active properties of 

 the eye and brain, and with those of the visible object. 

 The distinction between agent and patient is merely 

 verbal : patients are always agents ; in a great propor- 

 tion, indeed, of all natural phenomena, they are so to 



