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Antecedence and consequence, like likeness and unlikeness, must therefore, according to J. S. Mill, be 'postulated as universal conditions of Nature, inherent in all our feelings whether of external or internal consciousness. In other words, apparently, time is an ultimate form of thought.
But Mr Mill's own reasoning on the same side is of a still higher order, enlarging the grounds previously urged in the last book of his 'System of Logic, He protests against the term Necessity; and discards the idea of Necessity, if it be understood to imply anything more than invariability of antecedence and consequence. But does consciousness really attest what is called Free-will?
Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence among these phenomena, so as to be able, at least in our regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty, or even with any high degree of probability.
Could we, in fact, see all the minute changes in bodies we should actually perceive that cause means nothing but 'the immediate invariable antecedence of an event. Brown especially argues against the attempts of d'Alembert and Euler to deduce the first laws of motion from the principle of 'sufficient reason. That, as he argues in detail, is merely begging the question, by introducing the principle of causation under an alias.
The latter statement of the difference between memory and imagination is less open to cavil than the former, though by no means unassailable. The special characteristic of a memory surely is not its vividness; but that it is a complex idea, in which the idea of that which is remembered is related by co-existence with other ideas, and by antecedence with present impressions.
The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
On the other hand, the practical centre of art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to Paris and its neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able to make anything like a home; and the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism, impressionism, and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as a matter of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to their own.
'Their being alike, as his son interprets, 'is nothing but their being felt to be alike which does not help us. So 'antecedence and consequence' are 'explained' by saying that one of two feelings calls up the other; or, as the son again remarks, antecedence is explained by antecedence, and succession by succession.
The only new departure is the aeroplane, for the gas attack is another form of the Chinese stink-pot and our old mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to the Flammenwerfer. The tank with its machine guns applied the principle of projectiles from guns behind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be considered an innovation by mediæval knights.
If we can produce the antecedent artificially, and if, when we do so, the effect follows, the induction is complete; that antecedent is the cause of that consequent. But we have then added the evidence of experiment to that of simple observation. Until we had done so, we had only proved invariable antecedence, but not unconditional antecedence, or causation.
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