the experiences of others, accepts them as the basis of his beliefs, in preference to even the most vivid recollections of his dreams.
The lunatic pauper, who regards himself as a king, the asylum in which he is confined as a palace of regal splendor, and his keepers as obsequious attendants, is so "possessed" by the conception framed by his disordered intellect that he does project it out of himself into his surroundings; his refusal to admit the corrective teaching of common-sense being the very essence of his malady. And there are not a few persons abroad in the world who equally resist the teachings of educated common-sense whenever they run counter to their own preconceptions, and who may be regarded as—in so far—affected with what I once heard Mr. Carlyle pithily characterize as a "diluted insanity."
It has been asserted over and over again of late years, by a class of men who claim to be the only true interpreters of Nature, that we know nothing but matter and the laws of matter, and that force is a mere fiction of the imagination. May it not be affirmed, on the other hand, that, while our notion of matter is a conception of the intellect, force is that of which we have the most direct—perhaps even the only direct—cognizance? As I have already shown you, the knowledge of resistance and of weight which we gain through our tactile sense is derived from our own perception of exertion; and in vision, as in hearing, it is the force with which the undulations strike the sensitive surface that affects our consciousness with sights or sounds. True it is that in our visual and auditory sensations we do not, as in our tactile, directly cognosce the force which produces them; but the Physicist has no difficulty in making sensible to us, indirectly, the undulations by which sound is propagated, and in proving to our intellect that the force concerned in the transmission of light is really enormous.
It seems strange that those who make the loudest appeal to experience as the basis of all knowledge, should thus disregard the most constant, the most fundamental, the most direct of all experiences; as to which the common-sense of mankind affords a guiding light much clearer than any that can be seen through the dust of philosophical discussion. For, as Sir John Herschel most truly remarked, the universal consciousness of mankind is as much in accord in regard to the existence of a real and intimate connection between cause and effect as it is in regard to the existence of an external world; and that consciousness arises to every one out of his own sense of personal exertion in the origination of changes by his individual agency.
Now, while fully accepting the logical definition of cause as the "antecedent or concurrence of antecedents on which the effect is invariably and unconditionally consequent," we can always single out one dynamical—antecedent the power which does the work—from the aggregate of material conditions under which that power may be distributed and applied. No doubt the term "cause" is very loosely
