Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/73

 &c. &c. Wolf says: Causa est principium, a quo existentia, sive actualitas, entis alterius dependet; whereas it is obvious that in causality we have only to do with changes in the form of uncreated, indestructible Matter, and that a springing into existence of what did not previously exist is an impossibility. Want of clearness of thought may, no doubt, in most cases have led to these views of the causal relation; but surely sometimes an arrière-pensée lurks in the background — a theological intention coqueting with the Cosmological Proof, for whose sake it is ready to falsify even transcendental, à priori truths, the mother's milk of human understanding. We find the clearest instance of this in Thomas Brown's book, "On the Relation of Cause and Effect," a work of 460 pages, which, in 1835, had already reached its fourth edition, and has probably since gone through several more, and which, in spite of its wearisome, pedantic, rambling prolixity, does not handle the subject badly. Now this Englishman rightly recognises, that it is invariably with changes that the causal law has to do, and that every effect is accordingly a change. Yet, although it can hardly have escaped him, he is unwilling to admit that every cause is likewise a change, and that the whole process is therefore nothing but the uninterrupted nexus of changes succeeding one another in Time. On the contrary, he persists in clumsily calling the cause an object or substance, which precedes the change, and in tormenting himself throughout his tedious book with this entirely false expression, which spoils all his explanations, notwithstanding his own better knowledge and against his conscience, simply in order that his definition may on no account stand in the way of the Cosmological Proof, which others might hereafter state elsewhere. — But what can a truth be worth which needs devices such as these to prepare its way?

And what have our own worthy, honest German professors