Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/404

388 CKITICAL NOTICES: advanced. One who has introspectively discovered the conscious activity knows thus, directly or indirectly, that something, namely, A, with or without the co-operation of an extra-conscious factor, is the cause which produces something else, B. Now one who knows such a truth as this must surely be knowing some- thing universal, a law or principle, if indeed he knows anything worthy to be called causal connexion. He must know that when- ever A occurs under conditions definably similar to those which are here present, be these conditions themselves wholly in or partly outside of consciousness, B must follow. Unless one knows such a general principle, one has discovered no sort of causation. But at once, w 7 e may ask, how can introspection, which shows us merely that here and now, or retrospection, which shows us merely that on a number of remembered occasions, A, or something similar to A, is or has been succeeded by B, or by some- thing resembling B, how can either of these assure us of any such general law ? But if, going further, the psychologist's induction, following ordinary empirical methods, has taken account of cases sufficiently numerous to establish such a general principle, in what possible sense could such an induction, indirect, and con- siderately comparative of many different cases as it would be in what possible sense, I repeat, could it any longer be called an ex- pression of immediate feeling ? Immediate consciousness can tell only that B here follows A. The immediate facts A and B, and their sequence, however momentous, are, for introspection, merely facts of the moment. They have, as facts here present to introspec- tion, nothing but the connexion here felt. Any inductive basis for the principle that A tends, in a definable way, to be in general followed by B, must be sought outside of this moment, and cannot be here felt, as any immediate fact. But, perhaps, by the immedi- ately felt efficacy of A, as the producer or active begetter of B, one means nothing that can be expressed, as yet, in terms of a general principle or law. One means only that A is here efficacious in producing B, whether A would ever again be thus efficacious or not. However, if this is all that the immediately felt activity, the immediately present efficaciousness of A means, then it seems entirely unfair to speak of such connexions as in the least parallel to those which physical science regards as causal connexions. The causal connexions of physical science, whatever you may say of their warrant, whatever theory, Humean or Kantian, you may have of our knowledge of them, are all of them conceived as uni- versal connexions, or as connexions linking classes of facts. In consequence such connexions, by definition, are excluded from being objects of anybody's immediate experience. They cannot be felt, they must be conceived. Experience can verify them indirectly, but never present them at one time. They are objects, not of immediate experience, but of indirect knowledge. And this they are, not because the physical objects are, as such, things in themselves, but because the connexions in question are, as