COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



stitutlon of our thinking minds, it is a belief 

 which ought to be found wherever we find a 

 thinking mind. It is hardly necessary to say 

 that this is not the case. Children, savages, and 

 other persons with undeveloped powers of rea- 

 soning believe in particular acts of causation, 

 but not in the universality of causation — a 

 conception which is too abstract for their crude 

 intelligence to grasp. Nay, I have known edu- 

 cated people who maintained that there might 

 be regions of the universe where the law does 

 not hold, and who thought it hardly safe to 

 deny that even on our own planet events might 

 occasionally happen without any determining 

 antecedent. Besides which, all those who still 

 accept the doctrine of the so-called " Freedom 

 of the Will," implicitly, and sometimes expli- 

 citly, assert that the entire class of phenomena 

 known as volitions are not causally determined 

 by groups of foregoing circumstances. The be- 

 lief in the universality of causation was certainly 

 not prevalent in antiquity, or in the Middle 

 Ages : its comparative prevalence in modern 

 times is due to that vast organization of expe- 

 riences which we call physical science ; and even 

 at the present day it is not persistently held, 

 except by those who are accustomed to scien- 

 tific reasoning, or to the careful analysis of their 

 own mental operations. 



But this argument does not strike to the root 



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