CAUSATION 



couched this doctrine ; but the doctrine itself 

 he seems to have misunderstood rather than 

 refuted. His favourite argument — that at one 

 stage of philosophic culture we can conceive 

 what at an earlier or later stage we could not 

 conceive — rests upon a confusion of language 

 which I trust has been sufficiently shown up in 

 the course of the foregoing discussion. As I 

 have already said, the only kind of inconceiv- 

 ability which we can admit as such is aji -impo- 

 tence which results from the very constitution 

 of the thinking process. As was shown in the 

 first chapter on the Relativity of Knowledge, 

 this is the case with our inability to conceive ab- 

 solute beginning or absolute ending. We must 

 therefore, to a certain extent, accept the Ham- 

 iltonian doctrine that our belief in the necessity 

 and universality of causation is due to an origi- 

 nal impotence of the conceptive faculty ; save 

 that an ultimate psychological analysis obliges 

 us to regard this original impotence as simply 

 the obverse of our inability to transcend our ex- 

 perience. 



Here again we come upon a bit of common 

 ground which underlies two opposing philoso- 

 phies. For our last senterlce, in its assertion and 

 in its proviso, recognizes both aspects of the 

 universal truth of which Kant and Hamilton 

 on the one hand, and Hume and Mill on the 

 other hand, have persisted in recognizing only 

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