88 Chauncey Wright. [vi. 



morrow morning. Your trust in the constancy of 

 Nature must be derived, therefore, from some prin- 

 ciple inherent in the very constitution of your 

 mind, implanted there by the Creator for a wise 

 and beneficent purpose. 



Once this transcendentalist argument was thought 

 to have great weight, but of late years it has fallen 

 irredeemably into discredit. For to-day the empiri- 

 cist retorts with crushing effect that, precisely because 

 we are wholly dependent on experience, and have no 

 other quarter to go to for rules of belief and conduct, 

 we cannot apply to the future any other rules of pro- 

 bability than those with which our experience of the 

 past has furnished us. If we had any criterion of belief 

 independent of experience, then we might perhaps 

 be able to believe that on the earth a million years 

 hence, or on Mars to-day, a piece of red-hot iron 

 would not burn the hand. Were we not strictly ham- 

 pered by experience, we might doubt the universality 

 of causation. But being thus strictly hampered, we 

 must either imagine the future under the same rules 

 as those under which we remember the past, or else 

 subside in a kind of mental chaos and form no 

 expectations whatever. To this view of the case 

 transcendentalism has as yet made no satisfactory 

 rejoinder. 



