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Updated: May 9, 2025
And Herbert Spencer, has this to say of this phase of the subject, "It is almost a truism to say that in proportion to the numerousness of the objects that can be distinguished, and in proportion to the variety of coexistences and sequences that can be severally responded to, must be the number and rapidity and variety of the changes within the organism must be the amount of vitality."
But, in fact, the distribution of these permanent causes, with the reason for the proportions in which they coexist, has not been reduced to a law; and this is why the sequences or coexistences among the effects of several of them together cannot rank as laws of nature, though they are invariable while the causes coexist.
As matter is merely something present in sensation or confused representation, so space and time are also nothing real, neither substances nor properties, but only ideal things the former the order of coexistences, the latter the order of successions.
G. F., on going out as secretary to the governor of Malta," &c. This sketch, too hastily made up, is founded upon a base of a very few years; i.e., we have, in one or two instances, placed in juxtaposition, as coexistences, events separated by a few years. "Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed"!
Both theology and metaphysics are superseded by science the investigation of causes and effects and coexistences; and the future progress of society will be guided by the scientific view of the world which confines itself to the positive data of experience.
The coexistence, therefore, of Primeval Causes, ranks, to us, among merely casual concurrences: and all those sequences or coexistences among the effects of several such causes, which, though invariable while those causes coexist, would, if the coexistence terminated, terminate along with it, we do not class as cases of causation, or laws of nature: we can only calculate on finding these sequences or coexistences where we know by direct evidence, that the natural agents on the properties of which they ultimately depend, are distributed in the requisite manner.
Since everything which occurs is determined by laws of causation and collocations of the original causes, it follows that the coexistences which are observable among effects cannot be themselves the subject of any similar set of laws, distinct from laws of causation.
Maintenance of the necessity, whether of sequences or of coexistences, is commonly thought rather a derogation from divine power than otherwise. Cuvier says "None of these parts can be changed without affecting the others; and consequently, each taken separately, indicates and gives all the rest." That is to say, in the nature of things the correlation could not have been otherwise.
"'Life, he says, 'is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences." "That defines the phenomenon," I said, "but gives no hint of its cause." "That," he replied, "is all that any definition can do.
It reduces other knowledge to the same degree of precision. That certainty which direct perception gives us respecting coexistences and sequences of the simplest and most accessible kind, science gives us respecting coexistences and sequences, complex in their dependencies or inaccessible to immediate observation.
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