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THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 491 On this view, customariness, whether in regard to co-ex- istence or sequence, may be a ground of expectation, pos- sibly intense expectation, without being a ground of rational thought, simply because it can never suggest the task of assigning the conditions of a phenomenon having, as against its not having, a given objective that is, prospective pre- .sentative significance. Mere customariness rejected, will it seem strange, in view of what has taken place in the history of philosophy, that we should yet adduce a principle of causality, in a bare and unambitious empirical sense, as the ground of the possibility of the effective assigning of such significances ? If Hume be right, if an empirical view of causality com- passes nothing wider and more intensive than is embraced in some customary succession in experience, we give up the case. We will go further, and say that if we had come upon the antecedent upon which a phenomenon is, in the language of John Stuart Mill, "invariably and unconditionally con- sequent," : we should have found ourselves reduced by such unconditionality to mere anticipation had there been time for it without thinking : because there was nothing left to think about. To attempt to give any reason for the succes- sion as reduced to a perfectly ^conditional succession is, by the very terms of the case, an unwarrantable interpolation. But Mill speaks not merely of an antecedent, but of a ""concurrence of antecedents," which introduces a very critical ambiguity. For if conjunctions in their immediate freshness be, as they seem, the founts of causal change, 2 we may assign the fact of the concurrence as a condition of any or each part of the group having causal relation to the phenomenon ; and so far, indeed, we can bring thought to bear upon the case. But this is not bringing thought to bear upon it so far as the sequence is regarded as uncondi- tional the concurrence itself being interpolated as a con- dition. Unconditional succession, if we could ever be sure we had found it, is a matter for effective association, not directly for thinking : and on the possibility of viewing causation as a 1 Logic, bk. iii., ch. v., S 6. 2 That any appreciably pre-constituted individual object or group should in its isolation be the cause of an effect arising at any time is at least inconceivable, whether that proves anything or not. Were it the sole constituent of the cause, it would seem that the effect must have existed as long as it has existed, leaving us no means of establishing it as the cause.