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Updated: May 6, 2025
We can seldom, indeed, be sure that the one point of agreement is the only one; but this ignorance does not, as in the Method of Difference, vitiate the conclusion; the certainty of the result, as far as it goes, is not affected. We have ascertained one invariable antecedent or consequent, however many other invariable antecedents or consequents may still remain unascertained.
For there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents.
The phenomena, the train of antecedents and consequents, remain as before; and this is all that I am truly concerned with. But take away the existence of my fellow-men; and you reduce all that is, and all that I experience, to a senseless mummery. "You take my life, taking the thing whereon I live." Human nature, and the nature of mind, are to us a theme of endless investigation.
The latter doctrine, in laying down simply that our volitions and actions are invariable consequents of our antecedent states of mind, and that, given our motives, character, and disposition, other men could predict our conduct as certainly as any physical event, states indeed nothing which is in itself either contradicted by our consciousness, or degrading; yet the doctrine of causation, as applied to volition, is supposed, from the natural tendency of the mind to imagine falsely that a mysterious constraint is exercised by any antecedent over the consequent, to imply some state of dependence which our consciousness does contradict.
Christophe uttered inarticulate cries; his hand, clutching the quilt, moved as if it were writing: and his exhausted brain went on mechanically trying to discover the elements of the chords and their consequents. He could not succeed: his emotion made him drop his prize. He began all over again.... Ah! This time it was too difficult.... "Stop, stop.... I can no more...." His will relaxed utterly.
In these cases we say that it is due to sameness of substance in same circumstances. The most cursory reflection upon our actions will show us that it is no more possible for living action to have more than one set of proximate consequents at any given time than for oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in the proportions proper for the formation of water.
If, now, we pass to the previsions constituting what is commonly known as science that an eclipse of the moon will happen at a specified time; and when a barometer is taken to the top of a mountain of known height, the mercurial column will descend a stated number of inches; that the poles of a galvanic battery immersed in water will give off, the one an inflammable and the other an inflaming gas, in definite ratio we perceive that the relations involved are not of a kind habitually presented to our senses; that they depend, some of them, upon special combinations of causes; and that in some of them the connection between antecedents and consequents is established only by an elaborate series of inferences.
We can seldom, indeed, be sure that the one point of agreement is the only one; but this ignorance does not, as in the Method of Difference, vitiate the conclusion; the certainty of the result, as far as it goes, is not affected. We have ascertained one invariable antecedent or consequent, however many other invariable antecedents or consequents may still remain unascertained.
There may indeed be a preparedness for it that may occupy much time, as dawn ushers in the sunrise, or as months of travail precede the "child born into the world;" and there maybe results whose character may require time to determine. Nevertheless, why should not conversion itself, apart from its antecedents or consequents, be sudden? Let us consider briefly what conversion is.
He at the same time calls attention to a valuable lecture of Sir W. Hamilton's, the thirty-second lecture on Metaphysics; especially to the instructive citation from Cardaillac contained therein, noting the important fact, which descriptions of the Law of Association often keep out of sight that the suggestive agency of Association is carried on, not by single antecedents raising up single consequents, but by a mass of antecedents raising up simultaneously a mass of consequents, among which attention is very unequally distributed.
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