LAW OF CAUSATION. 417 



effects produced and the object which produces them, 

 they are a very powerful instrument of abridgment, 

 and of that acceleration of the process of thought 

 which abridgment accomplishes. 



This class of considerations leads us to* a con- 

 ception which we shall find of great importance in 

 the interpretation of nature; that of a Permanent 

 Cause, or original natural agent. There exist in 

 nature a number of permanent causes, which have 

 subsisted ever since the human race has been in 

 existence, and for an indefinite and probably enormous 

 length of time previous. The sun, the earth and 

 planets, with their various constituents, air, water, and 

 the other distinguishable substances, whether simple 

 or compound, of which nature is made up, are such 

 Permanent Causes. These have existed,, and the 

 effects or consequences which they were fitted to pro- 

 duce have taken place, (as often as the other condi- 

 tions of the production met,) from the very beginning of 

 our experience. But we can give, scientifically speak- 

 ing, no account of the origin of the Permanent Causes 

 themselves. Why these particular natural agents 

 existed originally and no others, or why they are 

 commingled in such and such proportions, and dis- 

 tributed in such and such a manner throughout space, 

 is a question we cannot answer. More than this : we 

 can discover nothing regular in the distribution itself; 

 we can reduce it to no uniformity, to no law. There 

 are no means by which, from the distribution of these 

 causes or agents in one part of space, we could conjec- 

 ture whether a similar distribution prevails in another. 

 The coexistence, therefore, of Primeval Causes, ranks, 

 to us, among merely casual concurrences : and all those 

 sequences or coexistences among the effects of several 

 such causes, which, though invariable while those 

 VOL. i. 2 E 



