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Whenever a thinking man is asked to believe a statement, he is much readier to accept it as true if some reasonable cause is assigned for the existence of the fact that is being established. The argument from antecedent probability supplies this cause. The reasoning may be from the past toward the present, or from the present toward the future.
The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited catastrophe.
For, though these various causes produce, in other respects, sensations intrinsically different, and are not, therefore, capable of being resolved into one another, yet, in so far as they all produce motion, it is quite possible that the immediate antecedent of the motion may in all these different cases be the same; nor is it impossible that these various agencies themselves may, as the new doctrines assert, all of them have for their own immediate antecedent modes of molecular motion.
Yet the distinction, however incorrectly expressed, is not only real, but is one of the fundamental distinctions in science; indeed it is on this alone, as we shall hereafter find, that the possibility rests of framing a rigorous Canon of Induction. Does a cause always stand with its effect in the relation of antecedent and consequent?
This is a consequent will, resulting from acts of antecedent will, in which one wills the good. I know that some persons, in speaking of the antecedent and consequent will of God, have meant by the antecedent that which wills that all men be saved, and by the consequent that which wills, in consequence of persistent sin, that there be some damned, damnation being a result of sin.
But according to the contrary opinion, the first and principal conclusion seems to be, that there is nothing done without a cause, but that all things depend upon antecedent causes; the second, that the world is governed by Nature, and that it conspires, consents, and is compatible with itself; the third seems rather to be testimonies, of which the first is divination, approved by all sorts of people, as being truly in God; the second is the equanimity and patience of wise men, who take mildly and bear patiently whatever befalls, as happening by divine ordinance and as it ought; the third is the speech so common and usual in every one's mouth, to wit, that every proposition is true or false.
And if this absurdity drives us back to primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too, though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and integration, are parts of one undulatory process.
When the history of that great struggle with its antecedent and its consequent circumstances is written with a pen that shall indite naught but truth, when prejudice and partisanship are lived down, it may appear that Jefferson Davis rather than James Buchanan was the prime cause of the great mistake.
Lincoln, though its members entertained organic differences, a unit. There were occasions when the antecedent opinions and convictions of the members elicited discussion in regard to the powers, limitations, and attributes of government; but in the midst of war disagreeing political opinions as well as the laws themselves were silenced.
Thus, in the whole six times, M is only produced thrice; but of that thrice it is produced twice by A, once only by B. Consequently, when the antecedent probabilities of the causes are equal, the chances that the effect was produced by them are in the ratio of the probabilities that if they did exist they would produce the effect.
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