AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 67 



pillow does not all that you see. The fire that hardens clay 

 will soften wax: you can tell why in the one case, if, perhaps, 

 not in the other. For this, too, is to be admitted, that we can- 

 not always tell why. This, however, is but a moment's jar, and 

 the jar itself is the proof of the position. When the king, of the 

 dumpling in Peter Pindar, wonders " How, how the devil got the 

 apple in I " we laugh ; but the wonder we laugh at is the naive 

 confutation, as at hands of general mankind indeed, of the 

 mere pedantry that has made Hume's riddle a theory I If here 

 got there, there must have been a door of communication between 

 them. In all cases of causality, the first is not just on this side 

 and the other just on that side, because it is once for all just so : 

 in all cases of causality there is whether we know it or not 

 a door of communication between the two sides. Hume made 

 believe to shut this door up, and half a dozen worthy men have 

 taken him at his word ! 



It is worth while considering, however, that the very men 

 who explicitly deny all this sort of concrete virtue in the facts 

 themselves, and assert as well a mere provisional invariability 

 as a mere dry succession of an abstract first and an abstract 

 second those very men are in certain circumstances very in- 

 terestingly forward to refute themselves implicitly. Just tell 

 Mr Mill that Moses with a dry rod brought water from a dry 

 rock ! I do not think that that eminent philosopher will have 

 any difficulty there. And yet if causality is but a succession a 

 succession that may vary a succession in which the first is only 

 the first, the second only the second one would expect, on the 

 part of Comte and his disciples, rather a desire to accept the 

 miracle than that hot haste to reject it. Nay, the miracle they 

 refuse at the hands of Moses, they are ready to accept at the 

 hands of Mr Crosse : they are quite ready to believe it possible 

 for him to grind wet maggots out of dry electricity ! 



It may illustrate the position, at all events, should 1 say here 

 that the impossibility the Revulsion feels in regard to miracles 

 is precisely the impossibility I feel in regard to abstract succes- 

 sion. I cannot entertain the idea of mere positivity of associa- 

 tion, without community, without intermediating nexus. Very 

 curious ! Our modern Berkeleians, too, wry themselves into 

 the same mhumanity : they, too, see indifferent units indif- 

 ferently in succession, but at the will of God contriving to 

 secure for themselves thus (see Browning's "Caliban") a 

 Setebos to worship, and the creation of a Setebos to admire ! 



Independent succession is no belief of society at large, 

 however, in which reference I hold Sir John Herschel to name 

 the true concrete state of the case (in his "Astronomy," 

 p. 232), thus : 



" Whatever attempts have been made by metaphysical 



