Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/55

 et seqq., he rightly defines the ratio cognoscendi as a condition of the proposition; but in an example, § 125, he nevertheless confounds it with cause.

Lambert, in the new Organon, does not mention Wolf's distinctions; he shows, however, that he recognizes a difference between reason of knowledge and cause; for he says that God is the principium essendi of truths, and that truths are the principia cognoscendi of God.

Plattner, in his Aphorisms, § 868, says: "What is called reason and conclusion within our knowledge (principium cognoscendi, ratio—rationatum), is in reality cause and effect (causa efficiens—effectus). Every cause is a reason, every effect a conclusion." He is therefore of opinion that cause and effect, in reality, correspond to the conceptions reason and consequence in our thought; that the former stand in a similar relation with respect to the latter as substance and accident, for instance, to subject and predicate, or the quality of the object to our sensation of that quality, &c. &c. I think it useless to refute this opinion, for it is easy to see that premisses and conclusion in judgments stand in an entirely different relation to one another from a knowledge of cause and effect; although in individual cases even knowledge of a cause, as such, may be the reason of a judgment which enunciates the effect.

§ 12. Hume.
No one before this serious thinker had ever doubted what follows. First, and before all things in heaven and on earth, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason in the form of the Law of Causality. For it is a veritas æterna: i.e. it is in and by itself above Gods and Fate; whereas everything else, the understanding, for instance, which thinks