38 £SSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



cosmic and reign in all phenomena, must have all its 

 previous elements — succession, contiguity, causal 

 connexion, generation (mechanical, chemical, physio- 

 logical, and psychic) — translated upward into this 

 logical genesis. We have just seen that this has its 

 source in the mind's organic Idea, or primal self- 

 consciousness of its own intrinsic coherence, its own 

 variety in unity. 



(5) Final Cause, or Ideality. — This, the mind's 

 consciousness of its own form of being as self- 

 conscious, — that is, spontaneously conscious and 

 spontaneously or originally real, — is the ultimate 

 and authentic meaning of causality. In the cause 

 as self-conscious Ideal, the consciousness of its own 

 thinking nature as the "measure of all things," — as 

 "source, motive, path, original, and end," — we at 

 length come to causation in the strictest sense, 

 Kant's Causality tvitk freedom. It might happily be 

 called, in contrast to natural causation, supernatural ^ 

 causation ; or, in contradistinction from physical, 

 metaphysical causation. The causality of self-con- 

 sciousness — the causality that creates and inces- 

 santly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by 

 the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self- 

 consciousness purely — is the only complete cau- 

 sality, because it is the only form of being that is 

 unqualifiedly free. 



^ Again a caution against false associations with this word. 



