CAUSATION.. 75 



merely the legitimate outcome of the attempt to 

 apply the category consistently to the explanation 

 of things. And not only is Cause useless when 

 purged of its incongruities, but It Is false, If taken 

 at an earlier stage in the process. The necessary 

 connexion of cause and effect Is not, as Hume 

 rightly remarked, anything visible in rerum natura, 

 but a fiction of the mind. All we see in nature Is 

 how a thing Is or becomes, how one thing or phase 

 follows upon another. Either, therefore, the necess- 

 ary connexion is pure assumption, or all Becoming 

 must be called necessary ; in the latter case we 

 simply produce useless ambiguity in a useful term 

 without curing the defects of causation. If, again, 

 mere sequence Is causation, night, as has been long 

 ago pointed out, would be the cause of day. 



The fact is, that in applying the conception of 

 causation to the world we have made a gigantic 

 assumption ; and that all these difficulties arise 

 from the fact that our assumption breaks down 

 everywhere as soon as it is tested. Secondary 

 causes involve just as great difficulties as first 

 causes, the perplexities of which we have already 

 considered (oh. li., § lo). 



It Is assumed (i| that events depend on one 

 another, and not on some remote agency behind the 

 veil of Illusion. But what if the successive aspects 

 of the world be comparable to the continuous shuf- 

 fling of a gigantic kaleidoscope. In the tube of which 

 we were imprisoned as impotent spectators of a 

 world that had no meaning or intelligible connec- 

 tion ? Would not the attempt to know phenomena, 

 to derive one set from another by our category 

 of causation, be inherently futile ? And (2) it Is 

 assumed that we are both entitled and able to dis- 



