EVIDENCE OF UNIVERSAL CAUSATION. 109 



everybody does believe it ; and they number it among 

 the propositions, rather numerous in their catalogue, 

 which may be logically argued against, and per- 

 haps cannot be logically proved, but which are 

 of higher authority than logic, and which even he 

 who denies in speculation, shows by his habitual 

 practice that his arguments make no impression upon 

 himself. 



I have no intention of entering into the merits of 

 this question, as a problem of transcendental metaphy- 

 sics. But 1 must renew my protest against adducing 

 as evidence of the truth of a fact in external nature, 

 any necessity which the human mind may be con- 

 ceived to be under of believing it. It is the business 

 of human intellect to adapt itself to the realities of 

 things, and not to measure those realities by its own 

 capacities of comprehension. The same quality which 

 fits mankind for the offices and purposes of their own 

 little life, the tendency of their belief to follow their 

 experience, incapacitates them for judging of what lies 

 beyond. Not only what man can know, but what he 

 can conceive, depends upon what he has experienced. 

 Whatever forms a part of all his experience, forms a 

 part also of all his conceptions, and appears to him 

 universal and necessary, though really, for aught he 

 knows, having no existence beyond certain narrow 

 limits. The habit, however, of philosophical analysis, 

 of which it is the surest effect to enable the mind to 

 command, instead of being commanded by, the laws 

 of the merely passive part of its own nature, and 

 which, by showing to us that things are not necessa- 

 rily connected in fact because their ideas are con- 

 nected in our minds, is able to loosen innumerable 

 associations which reign despotically over the undis- 

 ciplined mind; this habit is not without power even 



