Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/549

KANT HAS XOT ANSWERED HT3IE. 537 it was on that relation alone that " all reasonings concerning matter of fact were founded " ; and it was to the sapping of that relation alone that he meant to apply himself. Any relation of ideas, all that concerned scientific abstraction (as in mathematics), was a region and a curiosity apart ; he could afford to neglect it ; he could afford to leave it un- touched and unmeddled with for the Virtuosi and Dilettanti in their closets ; but matters of fact ah ! that was different destroy any evidence for them, and then there was an end of Superstition with all its frippery of miracles and its in- convenient bigotry ! But there was no such evidence unless that of causality : and causality, to be sure, had a natural validity that, as natural, was of course authoritative. Still, what of that ? Here, for all that, was still an opening for logic, here, for all that, was precisely what argument had to lay its trenches against ! That, very certainly, was, at least in the end, the mental condition of Hume. Of causality as a fact, of causa- lity as (whenever and wherever it truly was) absolutely cer- tain, absolutely infallible, Hume never had a doubt. He would have been only amused could he have seen his fol- lowers, Brown and the rest, all gravely, pedantically bearing in, and, on the operating table, solemnly opening out mere ] succession empirically constant this, as the remarkable philo- sophical discovery of the illustrious David Hume, in regard to the true nature of that abstruse principle, causality ! Certainly the origin of the necessity that lay in it interested him ; for all cases of causality were still, evidently, but matters of fact, and as such, consequently, by rights ade- quate to no more than probability certainly that interested him, and since there was here as little any original of sense for him, as there was there any original of sense for Locke, he was really quite as sincere as this latter in referring to the influence of custom; not happening to be checked, as Kant was, by the reflection that such necessity could not possibly rest merely on one's own customary experience that it could not be subjective, but must be objective. This, I say, was, quite indubitably, the state of Hume's mind a state of mind that could, of course, only mount into rapture with him, over the sceptical profits it was plain he could draw from it. And saying this for Hume, I may allow myself here to say something similar for Locke. This, namely, that it is quite absurd to suppose that Locke ever for an instant dreamed that " the being of substance had no other foundation but the fancies of men ". At such a charge on the part of the Bishop of Worcester, he was simply indig-