Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/558

 546 J. HUTCHISON STIRLING : dently at once, it is a mere mundane matter. Fire and heat, the sun and light, a cloud and shadow, rain and flood, cold and ice, shutters and darkness, &c., these are all matters of fact and not relations of ideas. It is just a fact that the fire gives heat, the sun light, the clouds shadows, the rain floods, cold ice, shutters darkness, &c. Why, then and this is the whole problem in such cases do we treat mere matters of fact as relations of ideas, and say that the connexion is not one just found to be so and so by inspection of sense, but that it is one necessary, with a necessity as certain, sure, and irresistible as is that of any example what- ever of the necessary relation of ideas ? The effect must have a cause ; no change whatever but has a reason. Hume, now, admitted all this ; and the sole burden of his challenge was the origin of the necessity that we undoubtedly assume to be present. Why do we say, not that every change, simply as we happen to see, has a cause, but that every change, as assuredly we happen not to see, must have a cause ? I say in this latter case, as we happen not to see ; for that is precisely the contention of Hume ; and there is no doubt whatever that he fairly believed it. We do not see, he not only said but thought, the reason, the ground, on or in consequence of which we ascribe necessary connexion to the cause and its effect. Or, he said, if you see it if you, unlike myself, do see that ground, that reason, that secret tie that binds the effect to its cause, then I challenge you to produce it. Of course, it was but labour lost, in default of an answer, to shout to shout about the indispensable importance of the principle, the absolute necessity of the principle, the absolute certainty of the existence and validity of the principle. Hume knew all that ; Hume, once for all, admitted all that. It was simply preposterous to hold up in objection to Hume precisely what he himself, first of all, held up in objection, as it were, to his own self. But, really, one must find such action on the part of Hume's opponents a very venial one, not only in view of the tremendous significance of the prin- ciple at stake, but simply when we see Schelling after all that, and who was all that raise, in these late, and very late, days at Munich, the same cry, identically the same cry, as was raised, more than " sixty years " before that, by Reid, to say nothing of Beattie, Oswald and the rest, the cry of a fact, a fact, an ultimate fact, and so ! Hume, then, failing to perceive any general principle which made it clear to the understanding itself why we attribute necessity to the causal relation, was of course driven to reflect. We cannot say for certain that Locke