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sensible qualities, discover any power or energy, or give us ground to imagine 

 that it could produce anything, or be followed by any other object which we 

 could denominate its effect. * % * The scenes of the universe 



are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted 

 succession ; as the power, or force, which actuates the whole machine, is 

 entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible 

 qualities of body. We know that, in fact, heat is a constant attendant of 

 flame ; but what is the connection betwixt them we have no room so much as 

 to conjecture or imagine. It is impossible, therefore, that the idea of power 

 can be derived from the contemplation of bodies in single instances of their 

 operation, because no bodies ever discover any power which can be the original 

 of this idea." With equal emphasis, John Stuart Mill declares, that scientific 

 investigation is not concerned with the inquiry into the efficient cause of a 

 phenomenon, " the cause which is not only followed by, but actually produces, 

 the effect." Some writers, thinking they are following Mill, are ready to 

 assert that juxta-position of certain elements produces the galvanic current ; or 

 even, that like juxta-position produces mental action. Their master is more 

 consistent in his Nescience. Strange as it may seem, with him, as with the 

 great originator of this way of thinking, no one thing, within our knowledge, 

 produces any other. Certain things invariably follow other things : Hume, 

 Mill, Comte, pretend to know no more. The leaders entering the penetralia of 

 Nature's temple, report they find a vacant seat, an empty shrine ; (vacuam 

 sedem, inania arcana); the weaker followers declare they see the idol of 

 Material Necessity enthroned between the Cherubim.* 



I now turn to the teaching of the opposite school. This need not long 

 detain us ; for nothing is more certain than that thinkers of this class give not 

 the slightest countenance to the fallacy that the so-called powers of Nature can, 

 in themselves be causative. 



These metaphysicians, jealous as they are of the rights of common sense, 

 and strong in their belief that every instructive assurance of our nature points 

 at some reality, yet join with Hume and Mill to set aside that mistaken notion 

 which I am combating. " Rude nations," says Dr. Reid, "do really believe 



* With those disciples of Mill who, like a Reviewer of my former Lecture, 

 "attribute nothing to matter as a cause," I have, so far, no difference; except 

 that it seems to me they are not justified in adopting such a formula as ' ' that mental 

 phenomena are the result of cerebral organisation," without a distinct understanding 

 that the word "result" carries with it no sense of necessary connection. This is their 

 difficulty. For they themselves, in spite of their philosophy, like all mankind, cannot 

 help letting the true idea of cause (disowned by Hume) glide in. Thus, unwittingly, and 

 unwillingly, they are materialists. " Residt " will continue, in spite of every philosophic 

 caution to be taken as equivalent to " effect." "Effect" imports its correlative " cause." 

 If we wish to understand one another, we must banish words in which there lurks a 

 casual signification, and keep to terms such as "consequent" and "concomitant." My 

 reviewer himself betrays the weakness I have pointed out, and forgets the doctrine of his 

 school, when he talks of Nature "manipulating cerebral matter so as to produce mental 

 phenomena." What is this (to use his own language) but to make a supposed "meta- 

 physical entity 'Nature' 'do duty as an efficient cause." Nor is this in his mouth, 

 a mere rhetorical expression, such as he himself lays hold of in his remarks on the passage 

 cited by me from Martineau's Sermons. It betrays the inner conception of Natural (or 

 Material) Necessity, as the first cause of things. So in the poem of the great Latin 

 Materialist, Natura, Venus, dcedala tellus, are assumed as causes. Further on in the 

 argument I am pursuing in the text, I come upon the fundamental difference between the 

 two PhUosophies. Hume, and his sect, in ignoring causation (except, as an eviscerated 

 notion, in the sense of invariable sequence) contradict our consciousness of that moral 

 freedom, and avow their nescience of God : thus sapping the intellectual basis of both 

 Morals and Religion. By regarding Matter "merely as a condition of phenomena," like 

 Time and Space, this mode of thought escapes the grossness of common Materialism 

 becoming intensely Idealistic ; but the restriction of knowledge to phenomena leaves Man 

 a phantom in the world of phantoms. 



