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Updated: May 9, 2025
In any case, man has his antecedents; life has its antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain of causation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links we can examine, but the first link or the last we see, by the very nature of things, and the laws of our own minds, must forever elude us.
Finally, the strength of the association between the ideas depends upon 'the vividness of the associated feelings, and the frequency of the association. Hume had said that association depended upon three principles, 'contiguity in time and place, 'causation, and 'resemblance. Contiguity in time corresponds to the successive, and contiguity in place to the synchronous, order.
To illustrate this hypothesis we may compare it to that, by which I have already explained the belief attending the judgments, which we form from causation.
The attribute of being capable of understanding language, is a Proprium of the species man, since without being connoted by the word, it follows from an attribute which the word does connote, viz., from the attribute of rationality. But this is a Proprium of the second kind, which follows by way of causation.
We then examined the different kinds of Propositions, and found that, with the exception of those which are merely verbal, they assert five different kinds of matters of fact, namely, Existence, Order in Place, Order in Time, Causation, and Resemblance; that in every proposition one of these five is either affirmed, or denied, of some fact or phenomenon, or of some object the unknown source of a fact or phenomenon.
Such an objection is meaningless to one who knows the corresponding facts from supersensual experience, and in later chapters of this book the path will be indicated that may be followed in order to gain knowledge not only of the spiritual facts herein described, but also of the law of spiritual causation as a personal experience.
For as all our reasonings concerning existence are derived from causation, and as all our reasonings concerning causation are derived from the experienced conjunction of objects, not from any reasoning or reflection, the same experience must give us a notion of these objects, and must remove all mystery from our conclusions.
It adds nothing to the sum of human thought which might not be reached by Bacon's method; it only subtracts whatever has reference to the Divine and Supernatural, and especially everything connected with the theory of Causation.
If some modification in the antecedent A is always followed by a change in the consequent a, the other consequents b and c remaining the same; or, vice versâ, if every change in a is found to have been preceded by some modification in A, none being observable in any of the other antecedents; we may safely conclude that a is, wholly or in part, an effect traceable to A, or at least in some way connected with it through causation.
But though these opinions are often held by the same persons, they are two very different opinions, and the confusion between them is the eternally recurring error of confounding Causation with Fatalism. Because whatever happens will be the effect of causes, human volitions among the rest, it does not follow that volitions, even those of peculiar individuals, are not of great efficacy as causes.
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