54 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. i. 



abstract for their crude intelligence to grasp. Nay, I have 

 known educated 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 determin- 

 ing antecedent. Besides which, all those who still accept 

 the doctrine of the so-called "Freedom of the Will," impli- 

 citly, and sometimes explicitly, assert that the entire class of 

 phenomena known as volitions are not causally determined 

 by groups of foregoing circumstances. The belief 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 scientific reasoning, or to the careful 

 analysis of their own mental operations. 



But this argument does not strike to the root of the matter, 

 for though the belief in the universality of causation is not 

 a universal belief, the belief in its necessity in each particular 

 case is undoubtedly universal. And, as we have seen, the 

 Kantian denies the power of accumulated experience to 

 produce the belief that the future must inevitably resemble 

 the past. He reminds us that for many ages it was supposed 

 that all swans were white, until finally swans were discovered 

 in Australia which were not white ; and he asks what better 

 warrant can uniformity of experience give us than it gave 

 in this case. If after three thousand years a black swan 

 turns up, must we not suppose it possible that in three 

 thousand years more we may see a candle burn in an atmo- 

 sphere of pure nitrogen ? 



In answering this query, let us begin by observing that in 

 many cases, the mere accumulation of experiences is a matter 

 of but little consequence. A child believes, after one expe 

 rience, that fire will burn. When the chemist has shown, by 



