the highest sense, masters of our fate; and thus, as Mr. Oliphant Smeaton admirably says, "We ought not to be the dumb driven cattle of circumstances, but live in the glorious light of hopeful opportunities, making each circumstance a carrier to bear us onward to something higher. Not as machines or automata, but as reasoncrowned mortals capable of influencing Destiny as much as Destiny influences us-such is the attitude of mind of any man who has risen to eminence by breaking the chains binding us to precedent." In our moral freedom alone lies the possibility of our worth.

(3) Supplementary Remarks on the Causal Judgment.It is submitted that the foregoing pages give a true account of the causal judgment as found in experience-i.e. by an examination and interpretation of our own consciousness respecting it.

Reid on Cause.-No subject, however, seems to have given rise to more various or hopeless theories.2 Reid apprehended very deeply and clearly the real nature, the a priori and necessary character of the causal judgment.3

Kant. Others have recognised this truth, but whilst recognising, have obscured it. Kant, for example, recognises its a priori character, but loses the recognition amid the verbosities and tortuosities of his system. He thinks that he finds it, if I read him aright, in what he calls "the principle of the permanence of substance," whose "origin or extinction is impossible." 5 But what did he fairly and squarely mean by "substance"? If under that word he included the notion of a Primal Power, then he had apprehended the right notion of Cause; if not, not. But supposing that, at the places noted, he has apprehended the right notion of

1 Life of William Dunbar, p. 37.

2 v. Hamilton's Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 389-90, where various theories are discussed; also Discussions, pp. 606-28.

3 Fully admitted by Hamilton, Dissertations to Reid: Works, p. 753. • Critique of Pure Reason, p. 146.

Ib. pp. 136, 141.

Cause, he seems to fall into obscurity and self-contradiction elsewhere-maintaining that the principle that everything contingent must have a cause," is a principle without significance except in the sensuous world," that causality itself is a principle" without significance or distinguishing characteristic except in the phenomenal world,”—that it is "a principle of the cognition of nature, but not of speculative cognition," that it is "valid only in the field of experience -useless and even meaningless beyond this region."1 Now, as with him and many others, "experience" is confined (wrongly, I think) to cognitiones ex datis, it follows that by this restriction of the principle of causality, he completely destroys its a priori nature-i.e. as knowledge derived from principles (cognitio ex principiis), thus contradicting himself and effacing it from the category of necessary truths.

Kant makes a further mistake, I think, in mixing up the causal judgment with considerations of Time. "The principle of cause and effect," says he, "is the principle of the objective cognition of phenomena in regard to their relations in the successions of Time." 2 It is a mistake, I submit, to drag Time into the discussion at all. Cause necessarily works under Time; but Time per se, is, in no sense, causal. An Eternity of mere Time is neither going to produce an egg, nor any approach to an egg. Time is not the cause, nor any part of the cause of apples on the apple-tree. Mere time would as soon produce turnips on an apple-tree as apples: that is to say, it would never produce them. The cause, though within Time, is not of Time has no originating, or functional, or dynamical Time is of no more account in causation

Time.

power whatever. per se, than space.

Time and Cause are as heterogenous as

1 Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 374, 390. See further touching this limitation of "experience," infra, p. 313.

2 lb. p. 149. Mansel, apparently following Kant, makes the same mistake. Metaphysics, p. 374.

Time and Space, or Space and Cause. Every action and event, of course, requires and necessarily presupposes a where and a when (Space and Time), but they are, in themselves, wholly destitute of causal efficiency. Time and Space yield nothing more than their proper cognitions of duration and room.

He further errs, I think, in saying that Cause is inferred from the impossibility of an infinite ascending series of causes in the world of sense." 1 This rendering of the matter derives it from a negative source, whereas the causal judgment is a positive requirement. In the true sense of the word, the "infinite ascending series of causes," of which he speaks, are not causes at all, but only secondary causes, or medial processes, no regress of which, however prolonged, can give us any right notion of Cause-Proper. In seeking for a cause, we do not seek for something merely antecedent. Antecedents and their consequences can only yield us laws of nature-knowledge of contingent natural processes-cognitio ex datis; whilst the search for Cause-Proper is at the very outset, a search for a positive Power to produce, for a First Cause, whose existence, although altogether incomprehensible by us, we must necessarily affirm.

Hamilton.-Sir William Hamilton appears to make a similar mistake. "The Causal Judgment," he says, "does not even found upon a positive power; for while it shows that the phenomenon in question is only one of a class, it assigns as their common cause, only a negative impotence." Surely not. Surely our conception of causality is that of

1 Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 374-5.

"2

2 Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 395, 409. So Mansel: Metaphysics, p. 374. The latter supposes that in the causal judgment we "obey a moral, not an intellectual, obligation," etc., p. 375. I venture to say that morality has no more to do with the Causal Judgment than with the Ass's Bridge, or the Multiplication Table. The most immoral or irreligious person is as much under the sway of the causal judgment as the most authentic saintJudas Iscariot, as Simon Peter.

a positive Power.

for a positive judgment. of positive intelligence.

A "negative" impotence cannot account The causal judgment is a dogma In this respect it stands on the same level as the scientific dogma-Space is boundless; on the same level, in fact, as any other necessary truth. Necessary truths are not negations,-not derived from negative impotency. They are positive, all-embracing assertions or affirmations. The causal judgment " Everything contingent has a cause," is a positive assertion, not merely a "mental inability to know." Thus, although I truly say, "I don't know the efficient cause of this orange": although I go further and say, "With respect to its first origin, this orange is utterly inscrutable to me utterly inconceivable as to how it first came into being," I yet find myself under the necessity of thinking that it had an efficient Cause.

Again, Sir William says:-"It is the inability we experience of annihilating in thought an existence in time past, in other words, our utter impotence of conceiving its absolute commencement, that constitutes and explains the whole phenomenon of causality." I beg to differ entirely. It is the positive demand which we find ourselves making for an efficient commencement, that gives rise to the causal notion. The question of the conceivability or inconceivability of that commencement is quite another matter. Indeed, he himself implicitly recognises this truth in the same Lecture, wherein he speaks of "the quality of necessity by which we are conscious that the causal judgment is characterised"; 2 and elsewhere he says " A discovery of the determinate antecedents into which a determinate consequent is refunded, is merely contingent . . . but the judgment that every event should have its cause is necessary and imposed on us as a condition of our

1

Lectures, vol. ii. p. 407; Supplementary Dissertations to Reid: Works, pp. 936-7.

2 lb. p. 402.

In

human intelligence itself." Now, that which "is necessary and imposed on us as a condition of our human intelligence itself," is clearly positive and not negative-an affirmation, and not a declaration of mental impotence. this place he adds-" This necessity of so thinking (namely, that everything contingent must have a cause) is the only phenomenon to be explained"—wherein he seems to forget for the moment that no first principle admits of "explanation," that all first principles are primal dogmas of intelligence which, even by his own repeated confessions, we are incompetent to question, but which we are compelled by our mental constitution, not only to admit but to affirm.

His "law of the conditioned.”—In assigning the causal judgment to a "negative impotence" of mind, I think that Sir William is making a misapplication of his “law of the conditioned." It should be noted that this law is not applicable to the determination of the truth or falsehood of any proposition, but is of use only as a dialectical weapon against those who would like to speculate beyond their actual powers. For example, we declare it to be a necessary truth that everything contingent must have a cause i.e. a First Cause. Thereupon some very clever fellow starts up and argues-"A first cause is inconceivable; therefore there is no first cause." To this disputant we immediately rejoin—“True, a first cause is inconceivable; but your conclusion does not follow, for the absence of a first cause is equally inconceivable": so that as regards the inconceivability of the first cause, our disputant is quite as ill off with his denial as we are with our affirmation.

But this is not our position with regard to the actuality of a first cause. We have not to say-"A first cause either exists or does not exist "-thus leaving it undecided as to whether the first cause exists or not. The actual existence of the first cause is, as we have seen, a necessary truth. By the constitution of our minds we are compelled 1 Discussions, p. 606.