NATUKAL LAW AND MIRACLE. 



43 



Homer was the greatest poetic genius of antiquity. But he 

 knows of no absolutely inviolable causality. Gods and demons 

 intrude themselves constantly and ludicrously into his historic 

 matter, and submit it to obvious and extreme variation. 



Even such a truth-loving historian as Tacitus, who wrote 

 centuries after Plato and the Stoics, coolly records miracles, 

 which are in no way behind those of Homer. 



The most influential thinker of antiquity was Aristotle. But 

 even this realistic philosopher, naturalist as he was, contents 

 himself with the notion of a system of causes which permits of 

 incontrollable exceptions. Under the title of accidents, they 

 are relegated to that indefinite and irregular factor of nature, 

 the material, while regularity is ascribed to the other factor, 

 that of intelligent being. On that account, science, so far as 

 this disturbing factor enters into it, can get no farther than the 

 formula, " as a rule " (Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 

 1906). 



A philosopher like Epicurus, otherwise so consistent and 

 materialistic, accepted as his atomic theory that of a causeless 

 deviation from the normal. 



These instances suffice to show that even philosophic 

 intellects of the first order have probably had no acquaintance 

 with an absolutely unalterable Law of Causation in nature. 



Finally, we hardly need to go so far back, for about one-half 

 of living philosophers stand to the conviction that at least one 

 class of important phenomena, that of human will, is inde- 

 pendent of the unalterable Law of Causation, which in all else 

 they zealously defend. 



The declaration of the unexceptional validity of causality is 

 rather a special achievement of modern science. The latter 

 expresses itself thus : the naturalist must exclude all super- 

 natural explanations ; in his investigations he must be guided 

 by the theory that every occurrence has a natural cause, and 

 that the same cause always produces the same effect. 



But this theory of a universal and unalterable Law of 

 Causation is, for the accurate naturalist, no longer a new dogma 

 of natural philosophy established for all time past and future 

 and for the whole cosmos. Eather is it for him, so to say, a 

 utilitarian principle, that is, a method of research which is, in 

 relation to all his investigations, to be presupposed as a working 

 hypothesis, and which is to assist him in the practical 

 experience of his science. 



The Causal Principle remains therefore to the true and 

 critically exact student nothing more than a working 



