CHAPTER VI 

 CAUSATION^ 



IN the course of our examination of the Kan- 

 tian doctrine of Necessary Truths, the ori- 

 gin and justification of our belief in the ne- 

 cessity of causation was incidentally discussed. 

 We found that this belief can be explained and 

 defended only as the product of a mental limi- 

 tation due to absolute uniformity of experience. 

 We believe that, under the requisite conditions, 

 fire burned before we were born, that it now 

 burns in regions to which we have never had ac- 

 cess, and that it will continue to burn as long as 

 the world lasts, simply because we are incapable 

 of forming conceptions of which the materials 

 are not supplied by experience, and because ex- 

 perience has never presented to our conscious- 

 ness an instance of fire which, under the requi- 

 site conditions for burning, did not burn. Or, 

 in other words, we believe that in the absence 

 of preventive conditions, fire must always and 

 everywhere burn, because our concept of fire is 

 the concept of a thing which burns, and this 

 concept has been formed exclusively by ourex- 

 * [See Introduction, § 12.] 



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