474 FALLACIES. 



ginpd that any person would literally adhere : hut he who could so 

 write must he far enough from seeing, that the very reverse might be 

 the fact ; that there is nothing impossible in the supposition that no one 

 property which is true of the effect might be true of the cause. AVithout 

 going quite so far in point of expression, Coleridge, in his Biographia 

 Literaria* affinns as an " evident truth," that " the law of causality 

 holds only between homogeneous things, i. e., things having some 

 common property," and therefore, " cannot extend from one world 

 into another, its opposite :" hence, as mind and matter have no com- 

 mon property, mind cannot act upon matter nor matter upon mind. 

 Wliat is this but the a priori fallacy of which we are speaking? The 

 doctiine, like many others of Coleridge, is taken from Spinosa, in the 

 first book of whose Ethica [De Deo) it stands as the Third Proposi- 

 tion : " Q,u9e res nihil commune inter se habent, earum una alterius 

 causa esse non potest," and is there proved from two so-called axioms, 

 equally gi'atuitous with itself; but Spinosa, ever systematically con- 

 sistent, pvu'sued the doctrine to its inevitable consequence, the materi- 

 ality of God. 



The same conception of impossibility led the ingenious and subtle 

 mind of Leibnitz to his celebrated doctrine of a preestablished har- 

 mony. He, too, thought that mind could not act upon matter, nor 

 especially matter upon mind, and that the two, therefore, must have 

 been arranged by their Maker like two clocks, which, though uncon- 

 nected with one another, strike simultaneously, and always point to 

 the same hour. Malebranche's equally famous theory of Occasional 

 Causes was a further refinement upon this conception : instead of sup- 

 posing the clocks originally arranged to strike together, he held that 

 when the one strikes, God interposes, and makes the other sti-ike in 

 correspondence with it. 



Descartes, in like manner, whose works are a rich mine of almost 

 every description of a priori fallacy, says that the Efficient Cause must 

 at least have all the perfections of the effect, and for this singular 

 reason: "Si enim ponamus aliquid in idea reperiri quod non fiierit in 

 ejus caus§., hoc igitur habet a nihilo;" of which it is scarcely a parody 

 to say, that if there be pepper in the soup there must be pepper in the 

 cook who made it, since otherwise the pepper would be without a 

 cause. A similar fallacy is committed by Cicero in his second book 

 De Finihus, where, speaking in his own pei'son against the Epicureans, 

 he charges them -with inconsistency in saying that the pleasures of the 

 mind had their origin from those of the body, and yet that the former 

 were more valuable, as if the effect could surpass the cause. " Animi 

 voluptas oritur propter voluptateni corporis, et major est animi voluptas 

 quam corporis? ita fit ut gratulator lagtior sit quam is, cui gratulatur." 

 Even that, surely, is no absolute impossibility : a man's good fortune 

 has been known to give more pleasure to others than it gave to the 

 man himself 



Descartes, with no less readiness, applies the same principle the 

 converse way, and infers the nature of the effects from the assumption 

 that they must, in this or that property, or in all their properties, 

 resemble their cause. To this class belong his speculations, and those 

 of so many others after him, tending to infer the order of the universe, 



* Vol. i., chap. 8. 



