without light which comes not from these phenomena, the law of my accountable being: first, I ought, not merely I had best, I ought to do right: secondly, if I choose to do wrong, as I am perfectly at liberty to choose, I must (and when I say to myself I must, I am not pretending to teach others cosmical science), I must face and endure the consequences. No priest, no preacher, can come between me and the justice and mercy of that law, by which either stripes inflicted, or talents taken away, or both at once, will surely be the sequel of sin.

Of Mr. Spencer in person I have not the honour to know anything; of Mr. Spencer as a reasoner, I am sadly disappointed to know so much. In the direct line of my own topic I have spoken of his book; and I think I have made one thing clear, that, although he may be competent for the evolution of a cosmos or two, he is not the man who will help us to lay the foundations of a philosophy without assumptions.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CAUSE, AND MR. JOHN STUART MILL.

(140.) I BEGAN my philosophy with the one datum, 'I am thinking.' With this I begin it in every train of thought. In these pages I am thinking with 'I am' and 'I will' of philosophy, of which a leading impulse is, when dwelling on a confessed truth in a clear proposition, to demand the reason Why. How is this scientifically true to me and to other thinkersis a question that can be asked without apparent absurdity, even about a proposition such as 'I am,' of which it is impossible for me to frame a doubt. The question is best put in this form: What is the cause of me-the-thinker, the cause both of me and of my thinking? In other words, what is the complete condition, necessary and sufficient, that I be a thinker? I am sure that it is not science to say, I am thinking because I am thinking. I demand the condition logically necessary, the condition which, being withdrawn, I should be no more a thinker, and which,

having been at any previous moment withdrawn, I should then have been no thinker: and also the condition sufficient as well as necessary, the presence of which, without the need of any other condition, determines my being now a thinker. To say that there is no such one condition or sum of conditionsthat is, to say that I have no cause I know to be absurd. I see nothing absurd in the question, What is my cause? There may be an absurdity in supposing that I can answer it. That I am alive, is no answer; for to affirm my life, is to affirm, not to account for, my consciousness-that is, my conscious thinking; since none but a thinker can make a proposition. That I was alive, is no answer; for I cannot prove my thinking an hour ago to be the condition either necessary or sufficient for my thinking now. Nor can the answer be the affirmation of any antecedent fact whatever: the condition must be a fact of the present moment. No phenomenon, that is, nothing which I can describe in terms of sensation, time, space and number, can be my sought cause; for there is no scientific proof that a mere phenomenon is the necessary and sufficient condition of any other phenomenon, much less of that which is no phenomenon; and I, the thinker, am certainly no phenomenon to me or to others. To myself, I am

given in consciousness at the outset of all thought, a datum preceding all my knowledge, either of phenomena or of propositions; while by others I am inferred from phenomena.

(141.) It is clear so far what my cause is not: it is neither an antecedent nor a phenomenon. Science is familiar with causes which are neither one nor the other. What is the cause of the movement of the stone which I have released from my fingers? What is the condition necessary and sufficient to account for its going off in just that line, and with velocity continually increasing? We have a scientific answer to that; but it assigns neither an antecedent nor a phenomenon for cause. The cause is what we call a force, acting contemporaneously with the effect perceived by us, and a force which is utterly unmanifested, save by the phenomenal effects which it produces. The force of gravitation is no more a phenomenon than that which stirs the magnetic needle. A phenomenon appears to sense, and can be described by its appearance. No force was ever yet directly apparent to human sense Magnetism is as yet little more than the name of a cause unknown, a word which asks a question, not answers it, as science demands an answer. But gravitation is an answering law known to science, so that she can assign it in a rigorous formula, and can compute the

predicted working of that law from moment to moment, and from point to point, in fractions of seconds and hairbreadths, to hundreds of decimal places. Of the vast number of forces in action around us there is no other force of which we have a right to say that we are in possession of the demonstrated law, in time, and space, and number, besides certain laws which are part of the theory of gravitation. We know, as far as the science of the finite asks to know, the cause of the stone's movement in that selected line; the condition necessary such that, if it ceased to be present in that line, though acting in all others, the stone would not fall; and the sufficient condition such that, if it acted in that line and in no other, the stone would fall and exactly fulfil our predictions.

(142.) This may suffice to show what is meant by a cause in science. I protest against the employment of two words to express the sense which essentially belongs to one. An efficient cause is a silly tautology, because an inefficient cause, which is a true cause, is a contradiction in terms. The distinction between efficient causes and physical causes, of which Mr. J. S. Mill finds it convenient to avail himself, is unscientific and misleading. In fact, there are no physical causes known to accurate science which are } not efficient. The popular error of calling a mere antecedent, or a mere concomitant circumstance, by