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Updated: May 6, 2025
Why, it may be asked, should we go out of our way to invent unconscious memory the existence of which must at the best remain an inference when the observed fact that like antecedents are invariably followed by like consequents should be sufficient for our purpose?
Wherever, having nothing to guide us to the cause, we are obliged to set out from the effect, and to apply the rule of varying the circumstances to the consequents, not the antecedents, we are necessarily destitute of the resource of artificial experimentation. We cannot, at our choice, obtain consequents, as we can antecedents, under any set of circumstances compatible with their nature.
When we would give a complete explanation of the phenomena exhibited by, say, a heated body, we need to inquire as to the antecedents of the manifestation, and also its consequents. Where and how did it get its heat? Where and how did it lose it? When we know every step of those processes, we know all there is to learn about them. Let us undertake the same thing for some electrical phenomena.
In the preceding Essay I have referred to the theory of Berkeley, whose opinion is that there is no such thing as matter in the sense in which it is understood by the writers on natural philosophy, and that the whole of our experience in that respect is the result of a system of accidents without an intelligible subject, by means of which antecedents and consequents flow on for ever in a train, the past succession of which man is able to record, and the future in many cases he is qualified to predict and to act upon.
This is obvious if we reflect that the only means we have of ascertaining that energy is not destructible, is by observing that similar antecedents do invariably determine similar consequents. It is as a vast induction from all those particular cases of sequence-changes which collectively we call causation that we conclude energy to be indestructible.
He came into the world a philosopher " "He could see consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of their causes." "His understanding could almost pierce to future contingencies. . . ." "his conjectures improving even to prophecy, or to certainties of prediction.
Everywhere we find the exorcist and the witch-doctor existing as natural consequents of the belief that disease has a supernatural origin. We see it in both the teaching and practice of the early Christian Church. That great father of the Church, Origen, says: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruption of the air, and pestilence." St.
I am speaking of the particular facts and actions of the Gospel; of those, and those only. Now that I should be deceived, or the eye-witnesses have been deceived, under all the circumstances of those miracles, with all antecedents, accompaniments, and consequents, is quite as contrary to, that is, unparalleled in my experience, as the return to life of a dead man.
Arguments are derived from antecedents, and consequents, and contradictories, in this way. From antecedents: "If a divorce has been caused by the fault of the husband, although the woman has demanded it, still she is not bound to leave any of her dowry for her children."
A natural man may judge himself a fool in regard of the circumstances or consequents of his sin, but he is not convinced that sin in itself is an act of madness and folly. When the child of God is humbled he becomes a fool in his own eyes,—he perceives he had done like a mad fool, 1 Cor. iii. 18; therefore he is said then to come to himself, Luke xv. 17.
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