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Updated: May 6, 2025
The necessarian, when he reasons on the everlasting concatenation of antecedents and consequents, proves to his own apprehension irrefragably, that he is a passive instrument, acted upon, and acting upon other things, in turn, and that he can never disengage himself from the operation of the omnipotent laws of physical nature, and the impulses of other men with whom he is united in the ties of society.
The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent a multitude of distinct consequents.
Then said I: This is a mere shift and avoiding of the question, rather than a declaration of the cause; but if we please to consider, we shall find a great many accidents that are only consequents of the effect to be unjustly esteemed the causes of it; as for instance, if we should fancy that by the blossoming of the chaste-tree the fruit of the vine is ripened; because this is a common saying,
XIII. The next topic is one peculiar to dialecticians; derived from consequents, and antecedents, and inconsistencies; and this one is very different from that drawn from differences. For adjuncts, of which we were speaking just now, do not always exist, but consequents do invariably. I call those things consequents which follow an action of necessity.
We shall denote antecedents by the large letters of the alphabet, and the consequents corresponding to them by the small. Let A, then, be an agent or cause, and let the object of our inquiry be to ascertain what are the effects of this cause.
They were simply off duty, but could be summoned, like the genii in the story of Aladdin's Lamp. Now, a mechanical conception of any phenomenon, or a mechanical explanation of any kind of action, must be mechanical all the time, in the antecedents as well as the consequents. Nothing else will do except a miracle.
Far from admitting Volition as the only kind of cause which carried internal evidence of its own power, and as the real bond of connexion between physical antecedents and their consequents, he demanded some naturally and per se efficient physical antecedent as the bond of connexion between Volition itself and its effects.
And above all things, a number of accumulated definitions carries weight with it, and a repeated assertion of consequents, and a comparison of contrary and dissimilar facts, and of inconsistent circumstances. Causes too, and those things which arise from causes, and especially similarities and instances, are efficacious; so also are imaginary characters.
In admitting the existence of "vital manifestation," therefore, he virtually admits an antecedent vital principle, lying back of an effect as a cause, which must exclude anything like a contradictory judgment, so long as the laws of the human mind, in respect to logical antecedents and consequents, remain as they are.
The different antecedents and consequents being, then, supposed to be, so far as the case requires, ascertained and discriminated from one another, we are to inquire which is connected with which. In every instance which comes under our observation, there are many antecedents and many consequents.
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