xxxviii.] TIMK, SPACE, AND CAUSATION. 141» 



iiiutiou of iny pen. If a being were to exist, having powers Imaginary 

 of perception and thought like our own, but without any ijeing w^th 

 power whatever of acting on the world around it, I think thought 

 it is certain that its ideas of causation would be very unlike motor 

 ours. It would have exactly the same idea of causation po^^^i-s. 

 that we have, in the sense in which causation is resolvable 

 into mere " invariable and unconditional sequence ; " but it 

 would have no idea of causation in the sense of force ; and 

 force, as it appears to me, is the essential thing in our idea 

 of causation. 



It W'ill be seen that in this account of our original 

 cognition of the relation of cause and effect, I ascribe it 

 to experience, although I differ from Mill and the rest of Where I 

 those who regard causation as nothing more than " u-iii- ^f[i^j®^jj"^ 

 form and unconditional sequence." I agree with them in where I 

 ascribing it to experience ; but they ascribe it to experience 

 of the facts of the external world which we observe ; I 

 ascribe it to experience of the facts of the mind, of which 

 we are directly cognizant. When we say, for instance, 

 that " fire is the cause of heat," we state a fact which we 

 have learned purely from external observation. But Mr. 

 Mill maintains that when we say that " fire is the cause of 

 heat," our only meaning is, that " fire always emits heat, 

 and nothing more than the fire itself is needed in order to 

 have heat." I think, on the contrary, that more is meant 

 than this. I think we apply the analogy of our own 

 mental experience to the external world, and infer that 

 fire causes heat in the same sense in which good news 

 causes joy, or evidence causes belief. It may be said this 

 analogy is plausible only to that intellectual state in which 

 men try to explain the facts of the external world by the 

 fancies of their own minds. I think, on the contrary, that 

 the rejection of this analogy belongs to that exploded 

 system of psychology in which mind and matter were re- 

 garded as distinct and totally unlike substances. Tlie 

 progress of science has gradually brought us back to the 

 spontaneous conclusion of the earliest conscious thought, 

 before metaphysics were invented ; namely, that the mind 

 of man is not distinct from the matei'ial world in the 



