Thoughts on Causality. 



233 



force ; and these are qualities sustaining relations only to 

 intelligence. 



Whatever character, then, philosophy may authorize 

 chance to assume, she cannot concede to it the character 

 of cause. Existence cannot be the result of chance. No 

 mode of existence can be the result of chance. 



It is one of the results of science to prove that that which 

 had been regarded as a cause is only an effect. The more 

 we know, the longer the chain of intermediate causation 

 seems to be. Primitive man recognizes no interval between 

 cause and first cause. Every event in the natural world is 

 looked upon as the direct product of supernatural causa- 

 tion. This is not a theoretical, opinion, but a historical 

 fact, which I have ascertained after abundant research. 

 The relics of this habit perpetuated themselves amongst the 

 Greeks until the dawn of Greek philosophy ; and we are 

 assured by Draper and Tyndall, and the professions of the 

 philosophers themselves, that the aim of philosophy, in 

 which, in ancient times, all science was merged, was, to 

 demonstrate that events do not transpire through the direct 

 intervention of the gods, but according to the orderly 

 methods of physical law. With such gods as ruled in the 

 Greek pantheon, there must have been much to stimulate 

 philosophy and fonvard its aims. 



Advancing from the lowest stage of barbarism, the first 

 step in reflection discloses the law of invariable antecedence 

 and sequence amongst physical phenomena ; and the mind 

 attaches its ineradicable notion of cause to the invariable 

 antecedent. Here arises the notion of 'physical causation. 

 But the invariable antecedent is now regarded the effect of 

 first cause, acting in the guise of a supernatural power. 

 Here is one term interposed between first cause and ulti- 

 mate phenomenon. 



The next step in reflection discloses the same fact in 

 regard to the observed physical cause as had been noted 

 at first in regard to the last phenomenon. This is also 



Trans. viii.~] 30 



