74 SCEPTICISM. 



nected by chains of necessity, which ultimately de- 

 pended from the First Cause of the All. Then 

 Hume remarked that necessity was subjective and 

 falsely anthropopathic, and that the necessary con- 

 nexion between cause and ^effect could never be 

 traced. So It was suggested that If cause and effect 

 were merely antecedent and consequent, science 

 would suffer no hurt, and that It worked equally 

 well with an (ambiguously) "Invariable" antecedent. 

 But the arbitrary distinction between the anteced- 

 ent conditions which were causes of the effect, and 

 those which were not, proved untenable ; the cry 

 was raised that all the conditions must be included. 

 This was done, and It then appeared, as the 

 triumphant result of a scientific purification of the 

 category of causation, that the cause was Identical 

 with the effect ! And this reductio ad absurdum of 

 the whole conception was actually hailed as the 

 highest achievement of philosophic criticism, about 

 which it was alone remarkable that the element of 

 temporal succession from cause to effect should 

 somehow have dropped out of sight ! It was 

 simply curious that the category which was to have 

 explained the Becoming of nature should finally 

 involve no transition whatever, and thus be unable 

 to discern the various elements, to distinguish the 

 different phases, In the flow of things. The true 

 use of the conception was to teach us that every- 

 thing was the cause or the effect of everything else, 

 to suggest that our failure to see this arose from 

 an illusion of Time, unworthy of the timelessness of 

 our true Self 



Of course, however, It Is not Intended to suggest 

 that an extreme of epistemological fatuity like this 

 view of causation could ever work in practice ; it is 



