Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/838

816 Dr. Ward, I thought, winced a little when this appeal was made to him; whether it was that he differed with the Archbishop as to the drift of the passage quoted, or whether he regarded the society as in general too little educated in philosophy to appreciate arguments derived from the teaching of St. Thomas. As the Archbishop ceased, a good many eyes were turned upon Dr. Martineau, as if we had now got into a region where no less weighty a thinker would be adequate to the occasion.

I think, said Dr. Martineau—speaking with a singularly perfect elocution, and giving to all his consonants that distinct sound which is so rare in conversational speech—I think that the course of this discussion has as yet hardly done justice to the a priori elements in human thought which have contributed to the discovery of the general uniformity of Nature, and to the axiomatic character of the principle which we are discussing. I should not entirely agree with the Archbishop or with St. Thomas if I rightly apprehended the quotations from him, that we ought to ground our belief on the uniformity of Nature primarily on our belief in the constancy of the Divine mind. Historically, I doubt whether that could be maintained. For example, the Hebrew Scriptures, which are full of the praise of the moral constancy of the Creator, appear to attach very little importance to the uniformity of Nature's methods, which they often treat as if they were as pliant as language itself to the formative thought behind it. Still less can I agree with Mr. Bagehot's view that everything which rushes into the mind is believed without hesitation till hard experience scourges us into skepticism. I should say rather that the understanding is prepared to accept uniform laws of causation by the very character of human reason itself. It is remarkable enough that Aristotle fully recognizes the close connection between the necessary character of human inference and the necessary relation of cause with effect, that he treats the "beginning of change" (ὰρχὴ κινἠσεως) as either the cause which necessarily results in an effect, or the reason which necessarily results in an inference. "An efficient cause, therefore, may be found in any beginning of change either in the physical world or the logical. In both cases it has the same characteristics: necessity, whether in the form of inevitable sequence or in that of irresistible inference; and consecutive advance, a step at a time, along a determinate line, whether in outward nature or in inward thought. Whatever is, it either acts out or thinks out what is next. So far, therefore, as the universe is at the disposal of efficient causes, its condition at each moment results purely from the immediately prior, without the possibility of any new beginning. If an experienced observer could compress into a formula the law of all the simultaneous conditions, he would be able to foresee the contents of any future moment—not, however, to modify them, for his prescience depends on their being in themselves determinate, and on his calculations