Page:Biographia literaria; or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (IA biographialitera04cole).pdf/145

 up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find, that the scheme taken with all its consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies was not less impracticable than contra-natural. Assume in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensa, without Leibnitz's qualifying præter ipsum intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood by Hartley and Condilliac: and what Hume had demonstratively deduced from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms, and the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks without straw? Or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre-supposed in order to render experience itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essays (if the supposed error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe) is formed on a, and involves the old mistake of cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.