Inquiry Into the Relation of Cause and Effect (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART THIRD. SECTION I. The inquiries, in the preceding parts of the work, have been confined to two objects, ?the real import of the relation of cause and effect, and the sources of the general misconception with respect to it. If I have stated with accuracy the results of the former of these inquiries, we have seen that power, in every train of events, material or spiritual, is nothing distinguishable from the antecedents and consequents themselves, of which, and of which alone, every sequence must be composed. It is only a brief mode of expressing the antecedent itself and its consequent, as appearing in a certain order, and expected to appear uniformly in the same order. That which is, has been, and always will be, followed by a particular change, is the cause of that change; and whenwe endeavour to imagine, in a cause, more than this uniformity of a certain consequent change, we labour in vain, or we content ourselves with repeating, in new forms of words, that have no other difference than what is purely verbal, the same unvaried proposition, That a cause is that which has had, has, and will always have for its immediate consequent some particular change of which we speak. Of this uniformity of order in sequence we have a clear conception, and of more than this we have no conception whatever; yet, from the influence of various causes of error, we strive to persuade ourselves, that we do conceive more, and that, beside all the antecedents and all the consequents in nature, there is something to be distinguished from them, in every sequence, which connects these antecedents and consequents in mysterious union: as if, at the moment of creation, there had been thrown over nature, as it rose, some tissue of indissoluble bondage, invisible to mortal eye, and known only ...