FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 383 



must he be who thinks that a phenomenon is defined to 

 be the condition on which he supposes it to depend? 

 Accordingly he says soon after, not that our ideas are 

 caused by, or consequent upon, certain organic pheno- 

 mena, but u our ideas are animal motions of the 

 organs of sense." And this confusion runs through 

 the four volumes of the Zoonomia ; the reader never 

 knows whether the writer is speaking of the effect, or 

 of its supposed cause; of the idea, a state of mental 

 consciousness, or of the state of the nerves and 

 brain, which he considers it to presuppose. 



I have given a variety of instances in which the 

 natural prejudice, that causes and their effects must 

 resemble one another, has operated in practice so as to 

 give rise to grievous errors. I shall now go further, and 

 produce from the writings, even of recent philosophers, 

 instances in which the prejudice itself is laid down as 

 an established principle. M. Victor Cousin, in the 

 last of his very remarkable lectures on Locke (which as 

 a resume of the objections of the opposite school to 

 that great man's doctrines, is a work of eminent merit), 

 enunciates this maxim in the following unqualified 

 terms: " Tout ce qui est vrai de Feffet est vrai de la 

 cause." A doctrine to which, unless in some pecu- 

 liar and technical meaning of the words cause and 

 effect, it is not to be imagined that any person would 

 literally adhere: but he who could so write must be 

 far enough from seeing, that the very reverse might 

 be the fact; that there is nothing impossible in the 

 supposition that no one property which is true of the 

 effect might be true of the cause. Without going 

 quite so far in point of expression, Coleridge, in his 

 Eiographia Literaria*, affirms as an " evident truth," 



Vol. i., chap. 8. 



