LAW OF CAUSATION. 



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place, IS commonly j included in the 

 phrase by which the effect is spoken 

 of, so that if it were also reckoned as 

 part of the cause, the seeming incon- 

 gruity would arise of its being sup- 

 posed to cause itself. In the instance 

 which we have already had, of falling 

 bodies, the question was thus put : 

 What is the cause which makes a 

 stone fall ? and if the answer had 

 been "the stone itself," the expression 

 would have been in apparent contra- 

 diction to the meaning of the word 

 cause. The stone, therefore, is con- 

 ceived as the patient, and the earth (or, 

 according to the common and most 

 unphilosophical practice, an occult 

 quality of the earth) is represented as 

 the agent or cause. But that there 

 is nothing fundamental in the dis- 

 tinction may be sctu from this, that 

 it is quite possible to conceive the 

 stone as causing it^s own fall provided 

 the language employed be such as 

 to save the mere verbal incongruity. 

 We might say that the stone moves 

 towards the earth by the properties 

 of the matter composing it ; and ac- 

 cording to this mode of presenting the 

 phenomenon, the stone itself might 

 without impropriety be called the 

 agent ; though to save the established 

 doctrine of the inactivity of matter, 

 men usually prefer here also to ascribe 

 the effect to an occult quality, and 

 say that the cause is not the stone 

 itself, but the weight or gravitation of 

 the stone. 



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 philo- 

 sophers, Brown in particular, for the 

 apparent explanation of phenomena) 

 is simply a sort of logical fiction, use- 

 ful sometimes as one among several 



modes of expression, but which should 

 never be supposed to be the enuncia- 

 tion of a scientific truth. Even those 

 attributes of an object which might 

 seem with greatest propriety to be 

 called states of the object itself, its 

 sensible qualities, its colour, 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 or- 

 gans, and those of other sentient 

 beings. What we call states of ob- 

 jects, are always sequences into which 

 the objects enter, generally as an- 

 tecedents or causes ; and things are 

 never more active than in the pro- 

 duction of those phenomena in which 

 they are said to be acted upon. Thus, 

 in the example of a stone falling to 

 the earth, according to the theory of 

 gravitation the stone is as much an 

 agent as the earth, which not only 

 attracts, but is itself attracted by, 

 the stone. In the case of a sensation 

 produced in our organs, the laws of 

 our organisation, and even those of 

 our minds, are as directly operative 

 in determining the effect produced, 

 as the laws of the outward object. 

 Though we call prussic acid the agent 

 of a person's death, the whole of the 

 vital and organic properties of the 

 patient are as actively instrumental 

 as the poison in the chain of effects 

 which so rapidly terminates his sen- 

 tient existence. In the process of 

 education, we may call the teacher 

 the agent and the scholar only the 

 material acted upon ; yet in truth all 

 the facts which pre-existed in the 

 scholar's mind exert either cooperat- 

 ing or counteracting agencies in rela- 

 tion 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 propor- 

 tion, indeed, of all natural pheno- 



