Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/544

 532 J. HUTCHISON STIRLING : did see that the Goodwin sands only made their appearance after the erection of Tenterden steeple ; but such mere after was not a causal through. No casual conjunction, as of stick and rain, steeple and sands, is a causal one : such are contingent only, not necessary. What are so conjoined are but separate facts that only happen to be so placed in time, simple successions, simple sequences in bare time. '. The one does not depend upon the other, and the one is not a conse- quent of the other : it merely follows the other and no more ; it merely happens to be after the other, simply that and no more, just as though your reading of this line at this moment were followed by a knock at your door. In that case, if we called the one event, that of the reading, A, and the other event, that of the knock, B, I do not think that you or any one else would feel any disposition to call such AB a causal one, a necessary one. The duality AB, where A is a fire and B light, is one evidently very differently conditioned : it is so conditioned, namely, that A must be first, and B inust be second ; the light B never precedes but always follows the fire A ; in a word, it is so conditioned that we call the one cause and the other effect, and that we assume a power, a force, a virtue, a quality in the cause by which the effect is necessitated to ensue. 1 That is undoubtedly the state of the case, the nature of the facts as we first approach them ; and it does not in any way belong to Hume's intention to deny this. Still it does- belong to the intention of Hume, the intentional scepticisrn of Hume, theoretically to shake the usual or ordinary state of mind in which the facts concerned are present to us. Practi^ (.'('Hy, this is not so. Hume directly affirms, " We infer a j^t/- cause immediately from its effect ; and this inference is not only a true species of reasoning, but the strongest of all others," and accordingly, he draws a distinction between the relation of causality as naturally viewed, and the same relation as philosophically viewed. Causation, he says, " as a natural relation produces union among our ideas, and we are thus able to reason upon it, and draw an inference from it ". Nevertheless, philosophically or theoretically, it is his purpose, with the twinkle of sceptical mischief in his eye, to start such doubts and difficulties as may rather perplex us, or even, at least for the moment, shake our faith in some of the most implicit and important of our principles of reason- ing hitherto. Hume's final aim, of course, is the destruction 1 Of course, the materials being prepared, there is first the light and then the fire ; but to object here this only another example of the relation before us were simply pour rire !