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hesitation, seek for that cause. If you ask him why he does so, he will pro- 
bably say that it must have had a cause ; and thereby imply that his belief 
in causation is a necessary belief.” What is true of the man of science is 
equally true of the human mind under all possible conditions. It is an 
intuitive conviction of a necessary truth, that every event must have a cause. 
It is absolutely impossible for the mind to conceive the contrary. Let any 
one conceive of absolute universal Nothingness and he will find it impossible 
to conceive of anything as beginning to be ! Either, then, we must have 
recourse to the unphilosophical conjecture of an infinite series, or we must 
believe in an eternal Creator of the universe. 
In like manner, that adaptation points to a purposing intelligence is an 
intuitive cognition of the human mind. This does not arise from experience 
of adaptive power in other men ; and though continually verified by ex- 
perience, it does not rest in experience for its proof. Here too, as above, it 
is impossible for the mind to conceive the contrary. 
Having already exposed the fallacy of Hume on this point, and having 
traced the notions of causation and of power to their seat in the mind itself, 
I trust I have opened anew the way for the evidence of God in Nature, 
which physics is more and more unveiling, for metaphysics to take note of 
and classify. 
The reader who is interested in the preceding points of metaphysical 
inquiry, but who lacks facilities for studying German philosophy in the 
original, can put himself in communication with two of the greatest thinkers 
of Germany, by reading A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, by 
Professor Edward Caird, of the University of Glasgow; and The Logic of 
Hegel, by William Wallace, M.A., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. 
Kant was not satisfied with the argument from design, or as it is better 
called, the physico-theological argument for the being of God ; and while 
controverting Hume on some points, he agreed with him that the existence 
of order in the universe could at most establish a finite cause. This point I 
have considered on page 142. But another form of reply presented by Pro- 
fessor Caird is so thoughtful and suggestive that I give the gist of it here, 
referring the reader to the full argument in his eighteenth chapter. 
“ Why do we seek in things, in the world, and in ourselves, a truth, a 
reality, which we do not find in their immediate aspect as phenomena of the 
sensible world ? It is because the sensible world as such is inconsistent 
with itself, and thus points to a higher reality. We believe in the infinite, 
not because of what the finite is, but quite as much because of what the 
finite is not ; and our first idea of the former is, therefore, simply that it is 
the negation of the latter. All religion springs out of the sense of the 
nothingness, unreality, transitoriness — in other words, of the essentially 
negative character of the finite world. Yet this negative relation of the 
