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Fraud is a vera causa, but an hypothesis difficult of application when it is admitted that the effects could not be caused by ordinary mechanical means. Hallucination, through excitement, is a vera causa, but its remarkable uniformity, as described by witnesses from different lands and ages, knowing nothing of each other, makes us hesitate to accept a sweeping hypothesis of hallucination.

We can only say that, when precisely similar evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet, they said: 'The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is his minister'.

Interrogat autem Patricius qua causa venit Conall, and Conall related the reason to Patrick, and he said that he was not allowed to enter Tara; to whom Patrick said: "Go in now, as the doors are open; and go to my faithful friend, Eoghan Mac Neill, who will assist you, if you lay hold, secretly, of the finger next his little finger, which is always a sign between us." And so it was done.

Lady Emily confessed she had seen the face of a man at the window, but her evidence went no farther. John Gudyill deponed /nil novit in causa/. He had left his gardening to get his morning dram just at the time when the apparition had taken place. Lady Emily's servant was waiting orders in the kitchen, and there was not another being within a quarter of a mile of the house.

I could wish, or rather ardently desire, that you were here: then I should not want advice or consolation. But anyhow, be ready to fly hither directly I call for you. The diminutive is used to express contempt. Sometimes it was simply a legatio libera, a sinecure without any pretence of purpose, sometimes it was voti causa, enabling a man to fulfil some vow he was supposed to have made.

When his plan has failed, as fail it in all probability will, he still, with that serene assurance which is the attribute of mediocrity, will insist that it ought to have succeeded. "Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni." Those who knew him in Brittany tell me that long before he became a personage, "le plan de Trochu" was a standing joke throughout that province.

One man alone dared openly to combat the proposal, the great Carnot; and the opposition of Curée to Carnot might have recalled to the minds of those abject champions of popular liberty the verse that glitters amidst the literary rubbish of the Roman Empire: "Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni." The Tribunate named a commission to report; it was favourable to the Bonapartes.

For as this idea contains more of representative, than I of actual reality, I cannot have been its cause. While the ideas of all other things include only the possibility of existence, necessary existence is inseparable from the concept of the most perfect being. God cannot be thought apart from existence; he has the ground of his existence in himself; he is a se or causa sui.

The impassibility of God is the corner-stone of spiritual monotheism. Christianity owes it, as a philosophic doctrine, largely to Aristotle. He conceived deity as "actus purus," as the One who moves without being moved, a "causa sui." The popular gods of Greece were passible; they were possible objects of sense; they were acted on largely as man is acted on.

Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases.