Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/553

KANT HAS X'JT ANSWERED HUME. 541 nee judged according to this principle, inasmuch as it belongs to hmuaimature' so to jud^e. The serpent in Eden took it for granted in Adam. A child in Arabian story, &c. But we require no such fiction for the refutation of Hume ; for the child in the cradle, without custom and without le->on. turns itself in the direction of the sound it hears, with no other object than to see the cause, which, therefore, it presupposes. To judge, then, according to the law of cause and effect is imposed upon us by a necessity, independent not only of our will but even of our thought, and indeed in precedence of the latter. But what is independent of our will and thought that we term a real principle. It is therefore proved by experience itself that there is a real principle which, as it were, like a uni- versal gravitation determinative of movement to the centre, similarly compels us to judge according to the law of cause and effect, as to think iding to the law of contradiction." These notes of Schelling date from the period of his re- sidence at Munich, and were written certainly not earlier than 1827, possibly later even than the death of Hegel ; and one cannot help expressing surprise that a man of so much genius, talent, acquirement as Schelling, and so late in life, should have manifested such fatal and fundamental igno- rance, not only of the men, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Reid and others, but of the essential question itself, a question that had occasioned and conditioned the whole German movement. As regards Hegel, for example, no man that understood him could have so explained the law of causality ; he would surely have known that, after Hegel, it was impossible to speak of causality, or any such law, as a " real principle " in the sense of being a sort of innate principle, as it were, anatomically within us and independent of thought. To be quite unconscious, too, that this was nothing but the long exploded position of Eeid and his fellows ! As for Kant, the ignorance in his reference depends less, perhaps, on what is said than on what is not said. But let us for a moment just look at the intimations as they variously come. How erroneous the first words are, we see at once ; for we know now that it is a very strange account of the matter to * say Hume denied the validity of the. principle in use ; and it is just the opposite of the truth, as his every word avouches, to opine that Hume did not derive the law from experience. Of course, Schelling is perfectly well aware of the difference between proptcr hoc and post hoc ; but the very central blunder in his statement is the treating of the law as a mere " in- ternal necessity of our nature". Nor can anything well be simpler than at this time of day to refute Hume by that extraordinary reference to experience Adam and the ser- p'ent, the baby in the cradle, &c. ! That the latter should be found to turn itself in the direction of the sound will hardly explain the apodictic necessity of the law, which is 37