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tion of an event to a cause ? I answer that this is -a necessary- 
cognition of the human mind, given in and of the mind itself. 
The mind knows itself as a cause. It does not matter here 
whether this knowledge be spontaneous or the result of mental 
experiences. Of the first origin of cognitions in a child, the 
first realization of consciousness, we have no possibility of 
record. But this we know; that there comes to every mind a 
moment when it awakes to the feeling “ I cun ” and “ I will.” 
It knows the Ego in consciousness, and clothes the Ego with 
volition and with causality. With the blow of a hammer I 
break a crystal. We say the blow is the cause of the fracture ; 
and this loose use of the term cause is sanctioned by usage. 
But where and what is the cause ? In the hammer? Or in 
the contact of the hammer with the crystal ? Does it reside 
in the hammer ? Or is it developed by the blow ? There is 
no sense nor instrument fine enough to detect it. We see the 
blow, we see the fracture, but not ten thousand such experi- 
ences would enable us to see the cause. The cause, you will 
say, is the force applied behind the hammer. But that force 
is not an entity ; it is only a quality of the cause, and that 
cause is the power which is in me put in action by my will. 
All force is but cause in action. And the sublime doctrine of 
universal force points of necessity to universal cause, and that 
cause intelligent. Having its sole idea of cause through the 
consciousness of itself as a cause, the mind intuitively refers 
every event to a cause adequate in power and wisdom to the 
result. 
Even upon Hume’s own principle, the thing which “ experi- 
ence ” has taught us is that the adaptation of means or the 
collocation of materials for an end, must be referred to an 
intelligent designer purposing that end. And the world has 
grown so old in the infallibility of this so-called experience, 
that it accepts the principle as an axiom alike in its applica- 
tion to a watch and to a world. The principle being 
recovered, we are prepared to apply it more carefully than 
did Paley to the evidence of Nature to a supreme intelligent 
Cause. 
Teleology is not an invention of Christian theology. In 
perceiving an end in Nature, and from this assuming a divine 
Author of Nature, Plato and Aristotle anticipated Paul and 
Augustine ; and we are all familiar with Cicero’s reply to the 
Epicurean notion that the world was formed by a chance 
concourse of atoms. “ He who believes this may as well 
believe that if a great quantity of the letters of the alphabet, 
made of gold or any other substance, were thrown upon the 
gi*ound, they would fall into such order as legibly to form a 
book, say the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance 
