Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/197

Rh Without employing the word "will," then, let us look forth into the realities of man, and perhaps we shall fall in with the reality of it when we are never thinking of the word, or troubling ourselves about it; perhaps we shall encounter the phenomenon itself, when the expression of it is the last thing in our thoughts; perhaps we shall find it to be something very different from what we suspected; perhaps we shall find that it exists in deeper regions, presides over a wider sphere, and comes into earlier play than we had any notion of.

The law of causality is the great law of nature. Now, what do we precisely understand by the law of causality? We understand by it the keeping up of an uninterrupted dependency throughout the various links of creation; or the fact that one Being assumes, without resistance or challenge, the state, modification, or whatever we may choose to call it, imposed upon it by another Being. Hence the law of causality is emphatically the law of virtual surrender or assent.