70 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



motion in mass through the conduction of motion in molecule 

 vibration.* 



It is through this doctrine of the conservation of force that, 

 in regard to causality, Mr Bain, with a very proper air of 

 modest self-denial, makes a clutch at originality. He attributes 

 to himself the "innovation" of "rendering" " cause " " by the 

 new doctrine called the Conservation of Force," etc. But is 

 such " clutch " possible to one who denies power, and asserts 

 succession only ? There is the mechanical equivalent of heat : 

 what meaning can M E have for Mr Bain ? Will he believe 

 that there is heat here, and M E there, only as two units of a 

 mere succession which in their own nature are not identical ? 

 Manifestly, there is a community of nature in the two sides of 

 the conservation of force that summarily truncates any use of 

 them by Mr Bain at the same time that it is admirably 

 corroborative of the true theory of causality which places its 

 principle in Identity. Heat is motion, and really precisely the 

 same motion is M E. When stopped by a wall (say), the motion 

 of a cannon ball vanishes as in mass, but reappears as in 

 molecule heat. We see, then, in such an example, very 

 strikingly, how the virtue that conjoins the two terms in 

 causality is Identity. Power, therefore, is no abstraction, but has 

 an implement, & filling of identity. Instead, consequently, of the 

 conservation of force explaining causality, as is preposterously 

 the proposition of Mr Bain, it is causality that, on the contrary, 

 explains it. That is, Causality, as the universal, subsumes the 

 Conservation of Force, as the particular, under it. It is but 

 inconsistency, then, in - Mr Bain, that though the temptation 

 may be acknowledged would lead him, self-paralysed, as he is, 

 in regard to power, to the clutch alluded to. 



With reference to Mr Huxley, now, the result, so far, is 

 this : There is a necessary nexus in the relation of cause and 

 effect, and no interest of spirit is to be rescued from material- 

 ism by the denial of it. 



2. Nor is this one whit more possible by means of the 

 expedient that we do not know things in themselves that we 

 only know phenomena that we do not know what substance 

 is. Mr Huxley's reason for ignorance here is precisely my 

 reason, and everybody else's, for knowledge. As little as the 

 causal nexus disappears because it is no mere affair of sense, 

 so little does substance disappear for any similar reason. We 



* It is not in any man's power, then, to set bounds to the stored motion of the 

 universe, and it is not even in any man's power to prove the molecular motion of the 

 sun perishable. If all energy must end, why has it not ended ? The infinitude of the 

 past gives the same possibility of an end in the past, as the infinitude of the future 

 the possibility of an end in the future. Energy, then, has either begun, or has always 

 been. If begun, the principles of the beginning, in all probability, still are ; if always 

 been, then it always will be. 



