The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Preface to the Third Edition[*]
• Chapter I: Introductory Remarks
• Chapter II: The Relativity of Human Knowledge
• Chapter III: The Doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge, As Held By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IV: In What Respect Sir William Hamilton Really Differs From the Philosophers of the Absolute
• Chapter V: What Is Rejected As Knowledge By Sir William Hamilton, Brought Back Under the Name of Belief
• Chapter VI: The Philosophy of the Conditioned
• Chapter VII: The Philosophy of the Conditioned, As Applied By Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought
• Chapter VIII: Of Consciousness, As Understood By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IX: Of the Interpretation of Consciousness
• Chapter X: Sir William Hamilton’s View of the Different Theories Respecting the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XI: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XII: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In Matter, How Far Applicable to Mind
• Chapter XIII: The Psychological Theory of the Primary Qualities of Matter
• Chapter XIV: How Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel Dispose of the Law of Inseparable Association
• Chapter XV: Sir William Hamilton’s Doctrine of Unconscious Mental Modifications
• Chapter XVI: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Causation
• Chapter XVII: The Doctrine of Concepts, Or General Notions
• Chapter XVIII: Of Judgment
• Chapter XIX: Of Reasoning
• Chapter XX: On Sir William Hamilton’s Conception of Logic As a Science. Is Logic the Science of the Laws, Or Forms, of Thought?
• Chapter XXI: The Fundamental Laws of Thought According to Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter XXII: Of Sir William Hamilton’s Supposed Improvements In Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIII: Of Some Minor Peculiarities of Doctrine In Sir William Hamilton’s View of Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIV: Of Some Natural Prejudices Countenanced By Sir William Hamilton, and Some Fallacies Which He Considers Insoluble
• Chapter XXV: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Pleasure and Pain
• Chapter XXVI: On the Freedom of the Will
• Chapter XXVII: Sir William Hamilton’s Opinions On the Study of Mathematics
• Chapter XXVIII: Concluding Remarks
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Manuscript Fragments
• Appendix B: Textual Emendations
• Appendix C: Corrected References
• Appendix D: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited In the Examination, With Variants and Notes

CHAPTER XVI

Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Causation

sir w. hamilton commences his treatment of the question of Causation, by warning the reader against “some philosophers who, instead of accommodating their solutions to the problem, have accommodated the problem to their solutions.”^[*] It might almost have been supposed that this expression had been invented to be applied to Sir W. Hamilton himself. He has defined the problem in a manner in which it ^ahad^a been defined by no one else, for no visible reason but to adapt it to a solution which no one else had thought of.^*

“When we are aware,” he says,

This being Sir W. Hamilton’s idea of what Causality means, he thinks it unnecessary to suppose, with most of the philosophers of the intuitive school, a special principle of our nature to account for our believing that every phænomenon must have a cause. The belief is accounted for, “not from a power, but from an impotence of mind,”^† namely, from the Law of the Conditioned; or in other words, from the incapacity of the human mind to conceive the Absolute. We are unable to conceive and construe to ourselves an absolute commencement. Whatever we think, we cannot help thinking as existing; and whatever we think as existing, we are compelled to think as having existed through all past, and as destined to exist through all future, time. It does not at all follow that this is really the fact, for there are many things inconceivable to us, which not only may, but must, be true. Accordingly it may be true that there is an absolute commencement; it may not be true that every phænomenon has a cause. Human volitions in particular may come into existence uncaused, and, in Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion, they do so. But to us a beginning and an end of existence are both inconceivable.

Had this extraordinary view of Causation proceeded from a thinker of less ability and authority than Sir W. Hamilton, I think there are few readers, who, on reaching the sentence which I have marked by italics, would not have set down the entire speculation as a mauvaise plaisanterie.

But since any opinion, however strange, of Sir W. Hamilton, must be believed to be serious, and no serious opinion of such a man ought to be dismissed unexamined, I shall proceed to enquire, whether the problem of which he propounds this solution, is the problem of Causation, and whether the solution is a true one. To take the last question first; is it a fact that we cannot conceive a beginning of existence? Is it true that whenever we conceive a thing as existing, we are incapable of conceiving a time when it did not exist, or a time when it will exist no longer?

If, by incapacity to conceive an absolute commencement, were only meant that we cannot imagine a time when nothing existed; and if our incapacity of conceiving annihilation, only means that we cannot represent to ourselves an universe devoid of existence; I do not deny it. Whatever else we may suppose removed, there always remains the conception of empty space: and Sir W. Hamilton is probably right in his opinion, that we cannot imagine even empty space without clothing it mentally with some sort of colour or figure. Whoever admits the possibility of Inseparable Association, can scarcely avoid thinking that these are cases of it; and that we are unable to imagine any object but as occupying space, or to imagine it removed without leaving that space either vacant, or filled by something else. But we can conceive both a beginning and an end to all physical existence. As a mere hypothesis, the notion that matter cannot be annihilated arose early; but as a settled belief, it is the tardy result of scientific enquiry. All that is necessary for imagining matter annihilated is presented in our daily experience. We see apparent annihilation whenever water dries up, or fuel is consumed without a visible residuum. The fact could not offer itself to our immediate perceptions in a more palpable shape, if the annihilation were real. Having an exact type on which to frame the conception of matter annihilated, the vulgar of all countries easily and perfectly conceive it. Those to whom, if to anybody, it is inconceivable, are philosophers and men of science, who having formed their familiar conception of the universe on the opposite theory, have acquired an inseparable association of their own, which they cannot overcome. To them the vapour which has succeeded to the water dried up by the sun, the gases which replace the fuel transformed by combustion, have become irrevocably a part of their conception of the entire phænomenon. But the ignorant, who never heard of these things, are not in the least incommoded by the want of them; and if they were not told the contrary, would live and die without suspecting that the water, and the wood or ^bcoal^b , were not destroyed.

All this is not denied by Sir W. Hamilton; but his answer to it is, that if the universe were to perish it would still remain capable of existing, which, it seems, amounts to the same thing. We conceive it as having “virtually existed before it was created,” and as virtually existing after it is destroyed. We cannot conceive that there was, at the moment after creation, “a larger complement of existence in the universe and its Author together, than there was the moment before in the Deity himself alone.” Creation is to us merely the conversion of power into outward existence; annihilation only “the retractation of an outward energy into power.” So that potential existence is exactly the same thing as actual existence; the difference is formal only. Not only is power a real entity, but the power to create an universe is the universe: all created things are but a part of its substance, and can be reabsorbed into it. And this is presented to us, not as a recondite ontological theory, forced upon philosophers as an escape from an otherwise insuperable difficulty, but as a statement of what we all think, and cannot but think, from the very constitution of our thinking faculty. Is this the fact? Does any one, except Sir W. Hamilton, think that in computing the sum total of existence, worlds which God might have created but did not, count for exactly as much as they would if he had really created them? There is a corollary from this doctrine which also deserves attention. If the sum of potential and actual existence is always the same, then with every increase of actual existence, there must be a diminution of power: for if there was once the power without the universe, and is now the same quantity of power and also the universe, what our author nautically terms the “complement of existence”^[*] has been increased: which is contrary to the theory. By every exercise, therefore, of creative power, God is less powerful: he has less power now, by a whole universe, than before his power of creating the universe had been transmuted into act; and were he to “retract” the actual existence into potential, he would be more powerful than he now is, by that exact amount. Is this what all mankind think, and are under an original necessity of thinking? Is this the mode in which, by the “law of the Conditioned,”^[*] every one of us is absolutely necessitated to construe the idea of Creation? Sir W. Hamilton says it is.

By a desperate attempt to put an intelligible meaning into the theory, somebody may interpret it to mean that before the universe existed in fact, it existed as a thought in the Divine Mind; and that the idea of an universe, complete in all its details, is equivalent in the “complement of existence” to an actual universe. This is not, perhaps, incapable of being maintained; but it affords no escape from the difficulty. For, this idea in the Divine Mind—is the Divine Mind now denuded of it? Has the Deity forgotten the universe, from the time when the divine conception was reduced into act? If not, there are now both the universe and the idea of the universe; that is, a double “complement of existence” instead of a single.^*

But were it ever so true that we are incapable of conceiving a commencement of anything, and are necessitated to believe that whatever now exists must have existed in the same or another shape through all past time:—that Sir W. Hamilton should imagine this to be the law of Cause and Effect, must be accounted one of the most singular hallucinations to be found in the writings of any eminent thinker. According to Sir W. Hamilton, when we say that everything must have a cause, we mean that nothing begins to exist, but everything has always existed. I ask any one, either philosopher or common man, whether he does not mean the exact reverse; whether it is not because things do begin to exist, that a cause must be supposed for their existence. The very words in which the axiom of Causation is commonly stated, and which our author, in the first words of his exposition, adopts, are, that everything which begins to exist must have a cause. Is it possible that this axiom can be grounded on the fact that we never suppose anything to begin to exist? Does not he who takes away a beginning of existence, take away all causation, and all need of a cause? Sir W. Hamilton entirely mistakes what it is, which causation is called in to explain. The Matter composing the universe, whatever philosophical theory we hold concerning it, we know by experience to be constant in quantity; never beginning or ending, only changing its ^cforms^c . But its forms have a beginning and ending: and it is its forms, or rather its changes of form—the end of one form and beginning of another—which alone we seek a cause for, and believe to have a cause. It is events, that is to say, changes, not substances, that are subject to the law of Causation. The question for the psychologist is not why we believe that a substance, but why we believe that a change in the form of a substance, must have a cause. Sir W. Hamilton, in a tardy defence of his theory against objections,^* is forced, in a sort of way, to admit this, and virtually to acknowledge that all which we really consider as caused, we consider as beginning to exist. Nothing is caused but events: and it will hardly be said that we conceive an event as having never had a beginning, but been in existence as an event just as much before it happened as when it did happen. An event then being the only thing which suggests the belief or the idea of having or requiring a cause, Sir W. Hamilton may be charged with the scientific blunder which he imputes, far less justly, to Brown: he “professes to explain the phænomenon of causality, but previously to explanation, evacuates the phænomenon of all that desiderates explanation.”^†

Sir W. Hamilton was familiar with the teaching of the Aristotelian schools concerning the four Causes—or rather the four meanings of the word Cause, for synonymy and homonymy were, in their classifications, very often confounded: 1, Materia. 2, Forma. 3, Efficiens. 4, Finis: Efficiens being the only one of these which answers either to the common, or to the modern philosophical notion of Cause. Sir W. Hamilton confounds Materia with Efficiens; or rather ignores Efficiens altogether, and imagines that when the rest of the world are speaking of Efficiens, they mean Materia. It is the very thing which they pre-eminently do not mean. Sir W. Hamilton may choose to call nothing Existence except the permanent element in phænomena; but it is the changeable element, and no other, which is referred to a cause, or which could ever have given the notion of causation.

Sir W. Hamilton says that the total cause—that the “concurring or co-efficient causes, in fact, constitute the effect.”^‡ And again, “an effect” is “nothing more than the sum or complement of all the partial causes, the concurrence of which constitutes its existence.”^* “An effect is nothing but the actual union of its constituent entities;” “causes always continue actually to exist in their effects.”^† Because the original matter continues to exist in the matter transformed, the Efficiens which transformed it continues to exist in the fact of the change! Of course he takes as his example a case in which the material is the prominent thing, that of a salt, compounded of an acid and an alkali.

Strange that even this first degree of analysis should not have opened his eyes to the fact, that the moment he admits into causa efficiens anything more than materia, his theory is at an end. For he will indeed find in the salt, two of his three “co-efficients,” the acid and the alkali, with their ^daffinity^d ; but where will he find in it “the translating force, perhaps the human hand?” This essential “concause” does not embarrass him at all; it costs him nothing to make away with it altogether. “This last,” he says, “as a transitory condition and not always the same, we shall throw out of account.”^§ If we throw out of account all that is transitory, we have no difficulty in proving that all that is left is permanent. But the transitory conditions are as much a part of the cause as the permanent conditions. Our author has just before said that he takes the term causes “as synonymous for all without which the effect would not be;” and if the effect is “the sum or complement” of all the causes, the transitory as well as the permanent elements must be found in it. To exclude all the transitory part of the cause, is to exclude the whole cause, except the materials. Suppose the effect to be St. Paul’s: in assigning its causes, the will of the government, the mind of the architect, and the labour of the builders, are all cast out, for they are all transitory, and only the stones and mortar remain.^¶

It will have been remarked, that in propounding this theory of the belief in Causation, Sir W. Hamilton gives up Causation as a necessary law of the universe; maintaining that a fact is not to be supposed impossible to Nature because we are impotent to conceive it, and indeed regarding the free acts of an intelligent being as an exception to the universality of the law of Cause and Effect. But while in one place he pays this homage to his own principles, in another he entirely takes leave of them, and glides back into the beaten path of the school of thought which, erecting human capacities of conception into the measure of the universe, maintains that causes must be, because we are incapable of conceiving phænomena without them. After describing the process of ascending from cause to cause, quite gratuitously, as a progress towards unity, Sir W. Hamilton says,

A deliverance more radically at variance with the author’s own canons, could scarcely have been made. For, first, one of the principal of them is, that our inability to conceive a thing as possible, is no argument whatever against its being true. In the second place, the alleged impossibility of conceiving any of the phænomena of the universe to be uncaused, applies equally, on his own showing, to the First Cause itself. For, though he here talks only of one inconceivability, we are, if his theory be correct, under the pressure of two counter-inconceivabilities—being equally unable to conceive an uncaused beginning, or an infinite regress from effect to cause: it is equally inconceivable to us that there should, as that there should not, be a First Cause. In this difficulty, by what right does he (I mean merely as a philosopher, and on his own principles) select one of the rival inconceivabilities as the real interpreter of Nature, in preference to the other? And, having selected it, why apply it up to a certain point, and there stop? Why must all the phænomena of experience be referred to a single Cause, because we cannot conceive anything uncaused, and that single Cause be proclaimed uncaused, notwithstanding the same impossibility? An argument by Sir W. Hamilton would not be complete unless it wound up with his tiresome final appeal, “unless our intelligence be declared a lie.” It is time to understand, once for all, what this means. Does it mean that if our intelligence cannot conceive one thing apart from another, the one thing cannot exist without the other? If yes, what becomes of the Philosophy of the Conditioned? If no, what becomes of the present argument?^*

Sir W. Hamilton makes a far better figure when arguing against other theories of Causation, than when maintaining his own. He is usually acute in finding the weak points in other people’s philosophies; and he brings this talent into play, effectively enough, on the present subject. He is not, indeed, at all successful in combating the doctrine (substantially that of Hume and Brown) that it is experience which proves the fact of causation, and association which generates the idea: for against this he only has to say, that experience and association cannot account for necessity. Now, as to real necessity, we do not know that it exists in the case. Sir W. Hamilton himself is of opinion that it does not, and that there are phænomena (the volitions of rational intelligences) which do not depend on causes. And as for the feeling of necessity, or what is termed a necessity of thought, it is (as I have already observed),^[*] of all mental phænomena positively the one which an inseparable association is the most evidently competent to generate. I cannot, therefore, attribute any value to Sir W. Hamilton’s discussion of this point; but in his refutation of some of the theories of causation which have originated in his own hemisphere of the intellectual world, he is very felicitous. Take, for example, the doctrine of Wolf and the Leibnitzians (though not of Leibnitz), which “attempts to establish the principle of Causality upon the principle of Contradiction.”^[†] “Listen,” says our author,

But there is another theory of Causation which is not abandoned, but has formed for some time past the stronghold of the Intuitive school. This is, that we acquire both our notion of Causation, and our belief in it, from an internal consciousness of power exerted by ourselves, in our voluntary actions: that is, in the motions of our bodies, for our will has no other direct action on the outward world. This relation of the act of will to the bodily movement, it is maintained, is “not a simple relation of succession. The will is not for us a pure act without efficiency; it is a productive energy; so that in volition there is given to us the notion of cause; and this notion we subsequently transport,—project out from our internal activities, into the changes of the external world.”

To this doctrine Sir W. Hamilton gives the following conclusive answer.

With this reasoning, borrowed as our author admits from Hume, I entirely agree; and I wonder that it did not prove to Sir W. Hamilton how little the objection to a doctrine, that it is opposed to our natural beliefs, deserves the exaggerated value he sets upon it; for if there is a natural belief belonging to us, I should suppose it to be, that we are directly conscious of ability to move our limbs. It is, nevertheless, our author’s opinion that the belief is groundless, and that we learn even a fact so closely connected with us, in the way in which any bystander learns it; by outward observation.^†

Mr. Mansel, who agrees with Sir W. Hamilton in so many of his opinions, separates from him here, and adopts a modified form of the Volitional Theory. He acknowledges the validity of Hume’s and Sir W. Hamilton’s argument, and does not derive the idea of Power or Causation from mind acting upon body—from my will producing my bodily motions—but from myself producing my will. “In every act of volition, I am fully conscious that it is in my power to form the resolution or to abstain; and this constitutes the presentative consciousness of free will and of power.”^* And the sole notion we have of causation in the outward universe, as anything more than invariable antecedence and consequence, “is that of a relation between two objects, similar to that which exists between ourselves and our volitions.”^† Thus interpreted, continues Mr. Mansel, it is

Mr. Mansel recognises the possibility that in some other portion of the universe, phænomena may succeed one another at random, without laws of causation, or by laws which are continually changing. We cannot, he says, ^fconceive^f this state of things, but we can ^gsuppose^g it; and this very inability to conceive a phænomenon as taking place without a cause—in other words, this subjective necessity of the law of cause and effect—results, in his opinion, merely from the conditions of our experience. If we were asked, why a physical change must have a cause.

And further on,

In this exposition, which, I do not hesitate to say, contains more sound philosophy than is to be found on the same subject in all Sir W. Hamilton’s writings, I must, nevertheless, take exception to the main doctrine—that the type on which we frame our notion of Power or Causation in general, is the power, not of our volitions over matter, but of our Self over our volitions. In common with one half of the psychological world, I am wholly ignorant of my possessing any such power. I can indeed influence my own volitions, but only as other people can influence my volitions, by the employment of appropriate means. Direct power over my volitions I am conscious of none. However possible it may be that I possess this power without knowing it, a fact of consciousness contestable and contested cannot well be the source and prototype of an idea common to all mankind. I agree, however, with Mr. Mansel^[*] in the opinion which he shares with Comte, James Mill, and many others who see nothing in causation but invariable antecedence; that we naturally, and unavoidably, form our first conception of all the agencies in the universe from the analogy of human volitions. The obvious reason is, that nearly everything which is interesting to us, comes, in our earliest infancy, either from our own voluntary motions, or (a consideration too much neglected) from the voluntary motions of others; and, among the few sequences of phænomena which at that time fall within the scope of our perceptions, scarcely any others afford us the spectacle of an apparently absolute commencement; of one thing setting others in motion without being in motion itself—or originating changes in other things, while not itself undergoing any visible change. But as I do not believe, any more than Sir W. Hamilton or Mr. Mansel, that the state of mind called volition carries with it a prophetic anticipation, which can inform us prior to experience that volition will be followed by an effect; I conceive that, no more in this than in any other case of causation, have we evidence of anything more than what experience informs us of: and it informs us of nothing except immediate, invariable, and unconditional sequence.

It is allowed on all hands that part, at least, of our idea of power, is the expectation we feel, that when the cause exists, we shall perceive the effect; but Hume himself admits that in the common notion of power there is an additional element, an animal nisus, as he calls it,^[†] which would be more properly termed a conception of effort. That this idea of effort enters into our notion of Power, is to my mind one of the strongest proofs that this notion is not derived from the relation of ourselves to our volitions, but from that of our volitions to our actions. The idea of Effort is essentially a notion derived from the action of our muscles, or from that combined with affections of our brain and nerves. Every one of our muscular movements has to contend against resistance, either that of an outward object, or the mere friction and weight of the moving organ; every voluntary motion is consequently attended by the muscular sensation of resistance, and if sufficiently prolonged, by the additional muscular sensation of fatigue. Effort, considered as an accompaniment of action upon the outward world, means nothing, to us, but those muscular sensations. Since we experience them whenever we voluntarily move an object, we by a mere act of natural generalization, the unconscious result of association, on beholding the same object moved by the wind or by any other agent, conceive the wind as overcoming the same obstacle, and figure it to ourselves as putting forth the same effort. Children and savages sincerely mistake it for a conscious effort. We outgrow that belief; but it is not conformable to the mode of action of the human intellect that it should pass uno saltu, from a complete assimilation of the two phænomena, to conceiving them as totally different. The “natural tendency of men” so justly characterized by Mr. Mansel, “to identify, as far as may be, other agents with themselves,”^[*] does not admit itself baffled and give up the attempt after the first failure. The consequents being the same, when the mind is no longer able to suppose an exact parity in the antecedents, it still thinks that there must be something in common between them: and when obliged to admit that there is volition in one case, and a mere unconscious object in the other, it interposes between the antecedent and the consequent an abstract entity, to express what is supposed common to the animate and the inanimate agency—through which they both work, and in the absence of which nothing would be effected. This purely subjective notion, the product of generalization and abstraction acting on the real feeling of muscular or nervous effort, is Power. And this, I conceive, is the psychological rationale of Comte’s great historical generalization, that the metaphysical conception (as he terms it) of the universe succeeds by a natural law to the Fetish conception, and becomes the agent by which the Fetish theory is transformed into Polytheism, this into Monotheism, and Monotheism itself is frittered away into energies and attributes of Nature, and other subordinate abstractions.^[†]

Thus much respecting Causation as a conception of the mind. The law of Cause and Effect in its objective aspect, as the fundamental principle in the order of the universe, the basis of most of our knowledge, and the guide of all our action, has been so fully treated in its numerous bearings in my System of Logic, that it is needless for me to speak further of it here.^[‡]

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 376.

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[* ]When I say no one else, I ought perhaps to except Krug, from whom in another place our author quotes a sentence, containing at least the germ of his own theory. (Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 135. [See Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Logik, 2nd ed. (Königsberg: Unzer, 1819), §148.])

[[†] ]Persius, Satires, in Juvenal and Persius (Latin and English), trans. G. G. Ramsay (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1920), p. 352 (III, 84).

[[*] ]Ovid, Metamorphoses (Latin and English), trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1916), Vol. II, p. 376 (XV, 165).

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 377-8.

[† ]Ibid., p. 397.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 405-6.

[b-b]651 coals

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 377; cf. p. 286 above.

[[*] ]See, e.g., ibid., p. 404.

[* ]The curious notion that potential existence is tantamount to actual reappears in the Appendix to the Discussions. “The creation a Nihilo means only, that the universe, when created, was not merely put into form, an original chaos, or complement of brute matter, having preceded a plastic energy of intelligence; but that the universe was called into actuality from potential existence by the Divine fiat. The Divine fiat therefore was the proximate cause of the creation; and the Deity, containing the cause, contained, potentially, the effect.” ([App. I(A),] p. 620n.)

It is so frequent in our author’s writings to find doctrines of a very decided character laid down in one page, and implicitly or even directly denied in another, that so strange a doctrine as the one in question could not be expected to escape that fate. Accordingly, in [App. II(B)] p. 703 of the same volume, “the Potential” is defined to be, “what is not at this, but may be at another time.” If so, the universe, when it only existed potentially, was not: and did not count as part of the “complement” of present existence.

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[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, Appendix [iv] on Causation, p. 538.

[† ]Ibid., Vol. II, p. 384.

[‡ ]Ibid., Vol. I, p. 59.

[* ]Ibid., p. 97.

[† ]Ibid., Vol. II, p. 540.

[‡ ]Ibid., Vol. I, p. 59.

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[§ ]Ibid., p. 97.

[¶ ]On the same shoal is stranded an argument appended to the same discussion, which our author seems to think of considerable value in the establishment of a First Cause. The progress from cause to effect, he says, is from the simpler to the more complex. “The lower we descend in the series of causes, the more complex will be the product; the higher we ascend, it will be the more simple.” To prove this, he appeals to his example, the composition of a salt. (Ibid., pp. 59-60.) Now, the salt is indeed more complex than either of its chemical ingredients, the acid and the alkali; but need it be, or is it, more complex than the remaining “co-efficient,” the human hand, or whatever power, natural or artificial, brings the acid and alkali together? The event which causes, may be in any degree whatever a more complex fact, than the event which is caused by it.

eProfessor Bain (Logic, Pt. II, p. 36) considers Sir W. Hamilton’s theory of Causation to be an anticipation of the scientific doctrine of the Conservation of Force. There is, doubtless, some analogy between them, but they seem to me radically different. Force is the principle of Change, and is, therefore, really the leading ingredient in causation: but the conservation in Sir W. Hamilton’s theory is conservation of the element which has nothing to do with change. It is only equivalent to the old established fact of the unchangeableness in the quantity of Matter, in other words, of Resistance.e

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 60. [The words in square brackets are Mill’s.]

[* ][72] It has been suggested to me by a correspondent to whom I have more than once adverted, as an explanation of Sir W. Hamilton’s conflicting language respecting conceivability as a test of truth, that he probably distinguished between what may be termed unilateral and bilateral inconceivableness. I state the distinction in the words of my able correspondent. “Bilateral inconceivableness is no test of truth, for the obvious reason that it applies equally to two contradictory propositions. But Hamilton thought unilateral inconceivableness—an inconceivableness limited to one side of a question only—a proof of a positive deliverance of consciousness on the other side. Hamilton therefore frequently employs the principle that what is unilaterally inconceivable must be false, while he invariably denies that bilateral inconceivableness is any test of falsehood.”

Sir W. Hamilton may have had some such distinction in his mind, though if he had, it would not have been going out of his way to have stated it, instead of constantly enunciating the doctrine that things inconceivable to us may be true, in language which recognises no difference between the two cases. But the distinction, if he made it, is of no service to him. If it is possible for anything to be true which is inconceivable to us, the inconceivability of a supposition cannot be a deliverance of consciousness against it. On the contrary, the fact that both sides of an alternative which has no third side may be inconceivable, is a reductio ad absurdum of the opinion that inconceivability is an evidence of falsehood.

[[*] ]See p. 261 above.

[[†] ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 396.

[* ]Ibid., p. 397.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 391-2. The same argument is restated in the “Dissertations on Reid” with some additional development. “Volition to move a limb, and the actual moving of it, are the first and last in a series of more than two successive events, and cannot, therefore, stand to each other, immediately, in the relation of cause and effect. They may, however, stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect, mediately. But then, if they can be known in consciousness as thus mediately related, it is a necessary condition of such knowledge, that the intervening series of causes and effects, through which the final movement of the limb is supposed to be mediately dependent on the primary volition to move, should be known to consciousness immediately under that relation. But this intermediate, this connecting series is confessedly unknown to consciousness at all, far less as a series of causes and effects. It follows therefore à fortiori, that the dependency of the last on the first of these events, as of an effect upon its cause, must be to consciousness unknown. In other words: having no consciousness that the volition to move is the efficacious force (power) by which even the event immediately consequent on it (say the transmission of the nervous influence from brain to muscle) is produced, such event being, in fact, itself to consciousness occult; multo minus can we have a consciousness of that volition being the efficacious force by which the ultimate movement of the limb is mediately determined.” ([Note D,] pp. 866n-7n.)

[† ]Sir W. Hamilton adds, as a further objection to the theory, that it does not account for that, in our notion of causation, which is the sole ground for rejecting the Experience theory of it: its “quality of necessity and universality.” [Lectures, Vol. II, p. 392.] And this is true: the philosophers who combat the Experience theory of causation by the Volitional one, deprive themselves of a very bad, but still the best argument on their side of the question.

[* ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 139.

[† ]Ibid., p. 140.

[‡ ]Ibid., pp. 142-3. [For Descartes, see Principia Philosophiæ, pp. 51, 61 ff. (III, xxx, lxv ff.).]

[f-f]651conceive

[g-g]651suppose

[h-h]+652, 67, 72

[* ]Ibid., p. 148. [The words in square brackets are Mill’s.]

[† ]Ibid., pp. 149-50.

[[*] ]See ibid., pp. 149-53.

[[†] ]See “Of the Idea of Necessary Connection,” Section vii of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Essays and Treatises, Vol. II, p. 82, and Note C, pp. 601-2.

[[*] ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 142.

[[†] ]See, e.g., Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. V, pp. 85-7, 383-6, 432n-3n.

[[‡] ]See System of Logic, Bk. III, Chap. v, in Collected Works, Vol. VII, pp. 323ff.

[¶ ]On the same shoal is stranded an argument appended to the same discussion, which our author seems to think of considerable value in the establishment of a First Cause. The progress from cause to effect, he says, is from the simpler to the more complex. “The lower we descend in the series of causes, the more complex will be the product; the higher we ascend, it will be the more simple.” To prove this, he appeals to his example, the composition of a salt. (Ibid., pp. 59-60.) Now, the salt is indeed more complex than either of its chemical ingredients, the acid and the alkali; but need it be, or is it, more complex than the remaining “co-efficient,” the human hand, or whatever power, natural or artificial, brings the acid and alkali together? The event which causes, may be in any degree whatever a more complex fact, than the event which is caused by it.

eProfessor Bain (Logic, Pt. II, p. 36) considers Sir W. Hamilton’s theory of Causation to be an anticipation of the scientific doctrine of the Conservation of Force. There is, doubtless, some analogy between them, but they seem to me radically different. Force is the principle of Change, and is, therefore, really the leading ingredient in causation: but the conservation in Sir W. Hamilton’s theory is conservation of the element which has nothing to do with change. It is only equivalent to the old established fact of the unchangeableness in the quantity of Matter, in other words, of Resistance.e

[eProfessor Bain (Logic, Pt. II, p. 36) considers Sir W. Hamilton’s theory of Causation to be an anticipation of the scientific doctrine of the Conservation of Force. There is, doubtless, some analogy between them, but they seem to me radically different. Force is the principle of Change, and is, therefore, really the leading ingredient in causation: but the conservation in Sir W. Hamilton’s theory is conservation of the element which has nothing to do with change. It is only equivalent to the old established fact of the unchangeableness in the quantity of Matter, in other words, of Resistance.e]+72