LAW OF CAUSATION. 207 



ural agents existed originally and no others, or why they are commin- 

 gled in such and such proportions, and distributed in such and such a 

 manner throughout space, is a question we cannot answer. More than 

 this : we can discover nothing regular in the distribution itself; we can 

 reduce it to no uniformity, to no law. There are no means by which, 

 from the distribution of these causes or agents in one part of spaco, we 

 could conjecture whether a similar distribution prevails in another. 

 The coexistence, therefore, of Primeval Causes, tanks, to us, among 

 merely casual concurrences : and all those sequences or coexistences 

 among the effects of several such causes, which, though invariable while 

 those causes coexist, would, if the coexistence terminated, terminate 

 along with it, we do not class as cases of causation, or laws of nature : 

 we can only calculate upon finding these sequences or coexistences 

 where we know, by direct evidence, that the natural agents on the 

 properties of which they ultimately depend, are distributed in the re- 

 quisite manner. These Permanent Causes are not always objects ; 

 they are sometimes events, that is to say, periodical cycles of events, 

 that being the only mode in which events can possess the property of 

 permanence. Not only, for instance, is the earth itself a permanent 

 cause, or primitive natural agent, but the earth's rotation is so too : it 

 is a cause which has produced, from the earliest period (by the aid of 

 other necessary conditions), the succession of day and night, the ebb 

 and flow of the sea, and many other effects, while, as we can assign no 

 cause (except conjectm-ally) for the rotation itself, it is entitled to be 

 ranked as a pi'imeval cause. It is, however, only the origin of the ro- 

 tation which is mysterious to us : once begun, its continuance is account- 

 ed for by the first law of motion (that of the permanence of rectilineal 

 motion once impressed) combined with the gi-avitation of the parts of 

 the earth towards one another. 



All phenomena without exception which begin to exist, that is, all 

 except the primeval causes, are effects either immediate or remote of 

 those primitive facts, or of some combination of them. There is no 

 Thing produced, no event happening, in the universe, which is not con- 

 nected by an uniformity, or invariable sequence, with some one or more 

 of the phenomena which preceded it ; insomuch that it will happen again 

 as often as those phenomena occur again, and as no other phenomenon 

 having the character of a counteracting cause shall coexist. These an- 

 tecedent phenomena, again, were connected in a similar manner with 

 some that preceded them; and so on, until we reach, as the ultimate 

 step, either the properties of some one primeval cause, or the conjunc- 

 tion of several. The whole of the phenomena of nature were therefore 

 the necessary, or in other words, the unconditional, consequences of 

 the original collocation of the Permanent Causes. 



The state of the whole universe at any instant, we believe to be the 

 consequence of its state at the previous instant: insomuch that if we 

 knew all the agents which exist at the present moment, their colloca- 

 tion in space, and their properties, in other words the laws of their 

 agency, we could predict the whole subsequent history of the universe, 

 at least unless some new volition of a power capable of controlHng the 

 universe should supei-vene.* And if any particular state of the entire 



* To the universality which mankind are agreed in ascribing to the Law of Causation, 

 there is one claim of exception, one disputed case, that of the Human Will ; the detennina- 

 tions of which a large class of metaphysicians are not willing to regard as following the 



