Stoney — Natural Science and Ontology. 515 



2°. The labours of the mathematician and physical inquirer 

 have reduced phenomenal nature into the simpler form of diacri- 

 nomenal nature, which consists of motions ; and the investigations 

 of the student of dynamics seem to justify our believing that 

 every change in the motions of Nature has a "physical cause," i, e. 

 that it occurs only when the conditions of concomitant events 

 required by dynamics are fulfilled ; so that if we take under our 

 view the totality of all diacrinomenal objects there is no event 

 occurring without its dynamical cause : Nature is a complete con- 

 catenation of events. 



Now, if Nature be such a complete dynamical concatenation, 

 the autic antitheton to which it is due must be correspondingly 

 complete, the concatenation here being one of actual causation. 

 Hence it appears that the events occurring throughout this anti- 

 theton are all of them due to causes lying within itself — in other 

 words, it is the whole autic universe. 1 This conclusion seems to be 

 entitled to whatever authority attaches to the premiss from which 

 it is derived, viz. that the motions of nature are complete in their 

 dynamical relations to one another, the probability of which is 

 certainly great. 



If we distinguish, when considering the autic universe, between 

 the auta themselves and the relations between them which deter- 

 mine whether, in what way, and in what degree, they will act on 

 one another, it is of importance to observe that it is with the 

 changes and relations, not with the auta themselves, that we are 

 primarily concerned ; for it is these — the conditions of causation 

 in the autic universe — that are the direct autic antitheta of the 

 motions and space relations of diacrinomenal nature — in other 

 words, it is not what an auto is but what it does that we have to 

 consider. 



We have hitherto made no supposition as to what the auta of 

 the sense-compelling universe are. An hypothesis about them 

 may be called a noiinienal hypothesis (volw, to think about an 



wind. What occurs in the autic universe is the cause of the appearance of change in 

 Nature, not vice versd. 



1 Another way of enunciating this conclusion is that the sense-compelling universe 

 is the whole of the Universe. 



