Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/552

 540 J. HUTCHISON STIELING : minds to Locke at any time that there is question of what suggested to Hume this his problem of causality. But, be its origin what it may, I shall now take it for granted that its general nature is understood, and the peculiar Humian point of it seen into. And it is in place here to remark that, apart from Kant, the peculiar nerve of this problem, what Hume specially meant by it, has been quite as much mis- taken in Germany as in England itself. As much as this seems to me to be signally exemplified in the tenth volume (pp. 75 ff.) of the Works of Schelling (complete edition, just acquired). " Hume's attacks," it is said there, " went almost exclusively against the objective validity of the causal law, of the axiom that all that happens has ! a cause. We unhesitatingly guide ourselves in all our actions, as in our judgments nay, Hume, as a quite pragmatic or didactic historian that accounts for events from their causes, guides himself according to this law. And, what is strangest, we ourselves apply this law, and see others apply it, without being properly conscious of the law. We apply it not in / consequence of a scientific insight into it, but by nature and as it were in- necessitates us to judge so and so. Accurately viewed, Hume has only proved that so universal a law, valid not only for all actual but for all possible cases, cannot derive from experience. Experience certainly can extend to nothing universal. But now it was taken for granted that all knowledge issues from the senses. And there remained, therefore, nothing for Hume but to declare the universality in the application of the lav. merely subjective manifestation, which was to be explained by a merely subjective accustomedness. ' After,' he says, ' having in innumerable cases seen constant succession,' &c. I shall not now dwell on this, that even an endlessly repeated succession of two events A and B would still not always produce the notion of cause and effect were this law not imposed upon us, independently of any external experience, by an internal necessity of our nature. (Even an invariable post hoc is not necessarily a propter hoc ; there are even instances of post hoc not contingent, but in obedience to a rule, which we still see to be only post and not propter.} If we can certainly discriminate between the post and the propter in one set of cases, why not in all ? I shall not now insist on this reflection, nor ask, as I might, whether for refutation of Hume's doubt such a huge apparatus as the Kritik of Pure Reason were precisely necessary. It is singular enough that this refutation has been found so difficult, as also that no one till this moment has made the quite simple remark that it is quite well possible from bare experience itself. Hume explains the law from accustomedness, but to every accustomedness there belongs a certain time. Hume, there- fore, must concede not only to an individual but to the race a certain time during which it has always seen a certain event A to follow another event B, and so has formed at last the habit to consider the latter necessary. But just this, which Hume silently assumes and supposes himself able to assume, is not by any means to be assumed. For I am persuaded not one of us will be inclined to grant a time when the race judged not according to the law of cause and effect, and that Hume himself would concur. He would feel that the man from whom he had withdrawn the judgment ac- cording to cause and effect, would no longer appear a man to us. .We ma be perfectly sure, then, that the very first man on the very first day of
 * stinctively ; and so prove that there is a real principle within us which