low a train of reasoning, we are sure that they will always be able to do so, of course, on the supposition that the bodily organism needful to mental operation in man is not in a state of derangement. The amount of force which drives a ball a certain distance to-day, we are sure, will impel it to the same distance to-morrow. If a definite weight of oxygen has been ascertained chemically to unite with a certain definite weight of hydrogen, we are sure it will ever do so; and if we find the very same amount of oxygen not drawing to it the same amount of hydrogen, we argue that there must have been some change in the conditions of the oxygen. It is acknowledged that in such judgments there is and must be an observational element, which in spontaneous thought is ever the more prominent, it is ever the one about which the mind is most anxious, as being the only doubtful one; still there is also a necessary principle, which is overlooked only because it is indisputable and invariable. Rising from earthly to heavenly things, we look on God, who has produced works in which are traces of such large power and admirable wisdom, as a Being possessed of power and wisdom corresponding to the effects we discover, and as capable, whenever he may see fit, of producing works distinguished by the same lofty characteristics.

VI.

I may now refer to some Defective or Erroneous Views commonly taken of Causation. Some have laid down the principle that it is like that affects like. This seems to have been the principle of Empedocles, the Sicilian philosopher, that like is only affected by like. The likeness of things enables us to put them into classes; but it contains no principle of power. Very unlike things affect each other.

causes.

We are not constrained to seek for an endless series of An effect comes from a substance or substances with power. But the law of causation does not require us to go further back and seek for an endless series of When we trace the production of all things to God, the self-existent, with all power in himself, the mind is satisfied. It is thus we are to meet the scepticism of Hume and the difficulty of Kant as to our being obliged to seek for a cause of God.

causes.

I have declared that while we have a native and necessary conviction, it does not announce what effect any given cause must produce, or what is the cause of any given effect. On an effect presenting itself we believe that it must have a cause, but what the cause is, is to be determined by observation and a gathered experience. It is of special importance to observe that —

Our intuitive conviction is not of the Uniformity or Continuance of the Course of Nature. This is the vague shape in which the principle appears in the works of Reid and Stewart. The former says: "God hath implanted in the human mind an original principle by which we believe and expect the continuance of the course of nature, and the continuance of those connections which we have observed in time past. Antecedent to all reasoning, we have by our constitution an anticipation that there is a fixed and steady course of nature." There is a uniformity in nature. It is formed by a number of causes being so arranged as to produce orderly results, such as the alternation of day and night and the succession of the seasons. This regularity does

not proceed from mere causation. Day does not cause night, nor night day. Spring does not produce summer, nor does summer produce autumn. Every occurrence might be produced by causation without our having the

uniformity which we find in nature. To produce the order, it is needful that there be a collocation or adjustment of causes. The uniformity of nature is not a selfevident, a necessary, or universal principle of belief, which causation is.

It is a circumstance worthy of being noted, that the powerful mind of Kant, in his chase after the Unconditioned, represented by him as ideal, finds a progressus or a regressus of some kind or other in time, in space, in matter, in cause, in the possible or actual, but admits fully and explicitly that in regard to substance the reason has no ground to proceed regressively with conditions. In regard to causality we have a series of causes which go back unendingly, the unconditioned being the absolute totality of the series. But in substance there is no such regressus. "Was die Kategorien des realen Verhältnisses unter den Erscheinungen anlangt, so schickt sich die Kategorie der Substanz mit ihren Accidenzen nicht zu einer transcendentalen Idee, d. i. die Vernunft hat keinen Grund, in Ansehung, ihrer regressiv auf Bedingungen zu gehen" (Kritik d. r. Vernunft, p. 328). We have only to connect this doctrine of substance, not necessarily calling, according to the principles of reason, for a regressus, with his admission that substance involves power, to be able to maintain, and this without falling into any contradiction, that the effects seen in nature of a power above nature argue a substance having power, for which we are not required to seek for a cause.

Mr. J. S. Mill is successful in showing (Logic, Book 111. Chap. xxi.) that man's belief in the uniformity of nature is the result of experience, that it is entertained only by the educated and civilized few, and that even among such it has been of slow growth. But Mr. Mill has fallen into a glaring "fallacy of confusion"' in confounding our belief in causation with our belief in the uniformity of nature. The distinction was before him, at least for an instant, when, speaking of the irregularities of nature, he says "Such phenomena were commonly, in that early stage of human knowledge, ascribed to the direct intervention of the will of some supernatural being, and therefore still to a cause. This shows the strong tendency of the human mind to ascribe every phenomenon to some cause or other." It is of this tendency that I affirm that it is native and irresistible. He tells us that one "accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his imagination has

once learned to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one, for instance, of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience, or in our mental nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, reason for believing that this is nowhere the case." This statement about fixed laws is ambiguous. If by fixed law be meant simply order and uniformity among physical events, the statement is true. But if meant to signify an event without a cause, material or mental, the statement is contradicted by our “mental nature," which impels us to seek for a cause of every event. He is right in affirming that "experience" cannot authorize such a belief, but it is just as certain that our "mental nature" constrains us to entertain it; and surely, if there be laws in physical nature, there may also be trustworthy laws in our mental nature. There is the same confusion of two different things in the following passage: “The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise called the law of causation, must be received, not as the law of the universe, but of that portion of it only which is within the range of our means of sure observation, with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases."

I freely admit all this in regard to the order observable everywhere in our Cosmos; there may or may not be similar uniformity in the regions of space beyond. But our mental nature will not allow us to think, judge, or believe (these, and not "conceive," which is ambiguous, are the proper phrases), that in this our world, or in any other world, there can be an event without a cause.

It is not to my present purpose to enter on the subject of Miracles, but it does fall in with the topics discussed in the text to remark, that there is nothing in a miracle opposed to any intuition of the mind,certainly nothing opposed to our intuition as to cause. Hume, the sceptic, takes all sorts of objections to miracles, and the evidence by which they are supported, but he does not maintain that a miracle is impossible. It is "experience," according to him, "which assures us of the laws of nature (Essay on Miracles); and I hold that the same experience shows us effects in nature which constrain us, according to the intuitive law of causation, to argue a Power above nature, which power is an adequate cause of any miracle which may be attested by proper evidence. Brown has shown us very satisfactorily that a miracle, with the Divine Power as its cause, is not inconsistent with our intuitive belief in causation (Cause and Effect, note E). Ever since Fichte published his Versuch einer Kritik aller

Offenbarung, there have been persons in Germany who represent it as impossible for God to perform a miracle. This may be a necessary consequence of those false assumptions regarding our knowing only self, which landed Fichte in an incongruous pantheism, in which he at one time represents the Ego as the All-including God, as the "moral order;" and at another time represents God as the All, and absorbing the Ego. But it can plead in its behalf no principle either natural or necessary. A miracle is not in accordance with the uniformity of nature, and the Bible miracles serve their purpose as evidences, because of this; but they are in thorough accordance, as Mr. Mill admits, with the law of causation, for they claim God as their cause. The result at which we have arrived is, that the question of the occurrence of miracles is to be determined by the ordinary laws of evidence.