ch. vi.] CAUSATION. 147 



chance to begin, and your skin will escape ; — these are dis- 

 turbing conditions. But to say that, in the absence of such 

 conditions, the blaze will not burn your inserted hand, is to 

 state a proposition which is unthinkable, — a proposition of 

 which the elements cannot be united in thought save by 

 their mutual destruction. Why is this proposition unthink- 

 able? It is because not only the material of our knowledge 

 but our very mental structure itself, as I shall hereafter show, 

 is due solely to that perpetual intercourse between subject 

 and object which we call experience, so that, whatever verbal 

 feats we may succeed in accomplishing, we can unite in 

 thought no subject and predicate for the union of which ex- 

 perience has not in some way or other supplied the condi- 

 tions. I do not mean to say that the proposition in question 

 is not one which some ingenious person might stoutly main- 

 tain as a theory. We might, no doubt, hold the theory that 

 Fire does not burn, just as we might espouse the doctrine 

 that Triangles are circular, or that Matter is destructible. But 

 as was sufficiently proved in the chapter on the Test of Truth, 

 this shows only that it is possible for men to accept and 

 defend propositions which they cannot truly conceive. It is 

 easy to state the proposition that the Whole is equal to its 

 Part; but it is none the less impossible to think the thought 

 or no-thought, which the proposition seeks to express. We 

 are under a mental compulsion to think of the whole as 

 greater than its part, and to think of fire as a thing which 

 burns, because the conditions of our thinking have been pre- 

 scribed by that intercourse between our mind and environing 

 agencies, which we call experience. 



It is for the same reason that the mind is compelled to 

 believe in the necessity of causation, and that the cultivated 

 mind, which can realize all the essential conditions of the 

 case, is compelled to believe in its universality. For what is 

 the belief in the necessity and universality of causation? 

 It is the belief that every event must be determined by some 



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