202 INDUCTION. 



Those who have contended for a radical distinction between agent 

 and patient, have generally conceived the agent as that which causes 

 some state of, or some change in the state of, another object which is 

 called the patient. But a little reflection will show that the license 

 we assume of speaking of phenomena as states of the various objects 

 which take part in them, (an artifice of which so much use has been 

 made by some philosophers. Brown in particular, for the apparent 

 explanation of phenomena,) is simply a sort of logical fiction, useful 

 sometimes as one among several modes of expression, but which 

 should never be supposed to be the statement of a philosophical truth. 

 Even those of the attributes of an object which might seem with 

 greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sensible 

 qualities, its color, hardness, shape, and the like, are, in reality, (as no 

 one has pointed out more clearly than Brown himself,) phenomena of 

 causation, in which the substance is distinctly the agent, or producing 

 cause, the patient being our own organs, and those of other sentient 

 beings. What we call the states of objects, are always sequences into 

 which those objects enter, generally as antecedents or causes; and 

 things are never more active than in the production of those phenomena 

 in which they are said to be acted upon. Thus, in the last example, 

 that of a sensation produced in our organs, are not the laws of our 

 organization, and even those of our minds, as directly operative in 

 determining the effect produced, as the laws of the outward object] 

 Though we call prussic acid the agent of a man's death, are not the 

 whole of the vital and organic properties of the patient as actively 

 instrumental as the poison, in the chain of effects which so rapidly 

 terminates his sentient existence 1 In the process of education, we 

 may call the teacher the agent, and the scholar only the matei'ial acted 

 upon ; yet in truth all the facts which preexisted in the scholar's mind 

 exert either cooperating or counteracting agencies in relation to the 

 teacher's efforts. It is not light alone which is the agent in vision, but 

 light coupled with the active properties of the eye and brain, and with 

 those of the visible object. The distinction between agent and patient 

 is merely verbal : patients are always agents ; in a great proportion, 

 indeed, of all natural phenomena, they are so to such a degi'ee as 

 to react most forcibly upon the causes which acted upon them : and 

 even when this is not the case, they contribute, in the same manner as 

 any of the other conditions, to the production of the effect of which 

 they are vulgarly treated as the mere theatre. All the positive con- 

 ditions of a phenomenon are alike agents, alike active ; and in any 

 expression of the cause which professes to be a complete one, none of 

 them can with reason be excluded, except such as have already been 

 implied in the words used for describing the effect ; nor by including 

 even these would there be incurred any but a merely verbal incon- 

 sistency. 



§ 5. It now remains to advert to a distinction which is of first-rate 

 importance both for clearing up the notion of cause, and for obviating 

 a very specious objection often made against the view which we have 

 taken of the subject. 



When we define the cause of anything (in the only sense in which 

 the present inquiry has any concern with causes) to be " the antecedent 

 which it invariably follows," we do not use thi;: phrase as exactly 



