Viii THEISM', EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 175 



is in reality an effect of that other principle. 

 Moreover, though, in the person of Philo, Hume 

 assumes the axiom " that whatever begins to exist 

 must have a cause," which he denies in the 

 " Treatise," he must have seen, for a child may see, 

 that the assumption is of no real service. 



Suppose Y to be the imagined first cause and 

 Z to be its effect. Let the letters of the alphabet, 

 a, b, c, d, e, f, g, in their order, represent successive 

 moments of time, and let g represent the partic- 

 ular moment at which the effect Z makes its 

 appearance. It follows that the cause Y could 

 not have existed " in its fall perfection " during 

 the time a e, for if it had, then the effect Z would 

 have come into existence during that time, which, 

 by the hypothesis, it did not do. The cause Y, 

 therefore, must have come into existence at/, and if 

 " everything that comes into exitsence has a cause," 

 Y must have had a cause X operating at e, X a cause 

 W operating at d ; and so on, ad infinitiim. 1 



If the only demonstrative argument for the ex- 

 istence of a Deity, which Hume advances, thus 

 literally, " goes to water " in the solvent of his 

 philosophy, the reasoning from the evidence of 

 design does not fare much better. If Hume really 



1 Kant employs substantially the same argument : " Wiirde 

 das hochste Wesen in dieser Kette der Bedingungen stehen, so 

 wiirde es selhst ein Glied der Reihe derselben sein, und eben so 

 wie die niederen Glieder, denen es vorgesetzt ist, noch fernere 

 Unterstichungen wegen seines noch hoheren Grundes erfahren." 

 Kritik. Ed. Hartenstein, p. 422 



