Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/506

 492 HUBERT FOSTON : matter of conditional succession depends, I believe, the ex- istence of thought about the world. If, then, thought arises as the profitably sure assigning of the conditions of some objective significance for a presenta- tion, it is not the principle of causation either as one of mere customary succession, or as one of unconditional succession, that is involved in its establishing. A wakeful rational con- fidence in a sure system of successions springs up rather because, in cases where there does occur difference between the issues of antecedent groups assumed to be like, we can so constantly find, after all, an antecedent differentia 1 and this more and more as we are led to go about our inquiry with persistence and nicety. We are led further and further into the ranges behind ranges of such inquiry by the observa- tion, not of mere constancies which would hardly so muck as dully confirm our expectations; but of more and more subtle apparent inconstancies, which at first disappoint them, but which prove clues to the discernment of a relative con- stancy of determination on once unsuspected conditions. And the inquiry, ever deepening, ever expanding, penetrating- now with innumerable thread-like rootlets into the finest interstices of a far-spreading area, sustains at last our vigor- ous growth of confidence in the system of happenings as- something which is more and more surely and profoundly to be "accounted for". Thus there has arisen a general ex- pectation, growing in weight, widening in consistent applica- tion not merely, as Hume seems to have fancied, that events will continue to happen according to already observed constancies but that every inconstancy (as it appears to pre-conception), will, when inquired into, yield us the know- ledge of some more delicately contingent constancies. The presence of the new differentiae learnt can be assigned (subject to correction, as we shall see in a moment) as the condition of the phenomenon as we at first knew it more surely having the significance we supposed. The absence of them is thereby assigned as a contributory condition for a negative significance. And should this negative significance- in turn be found inconstant, we may be able to observe the intrusion of totally fresh differentiae in the absence, however,. 1 Primitive instances of such finding may occur through the uncertain working of an instrument chosen or fashioned for a purpose the purpose- stimulating and denning the effort to remedy the uncertainty. Perhaps even to-day the average man's sense of precise causality is sharper, the- impulse to seek a differential ground of accidental variants keener, in regard to machinery, than in regard to free objects in nature. Cf. follow- ing section.