Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/197

160 transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the transcendent objects which cause experience in us.” Hereupon, however, one asks, at the present stage: What, then, leads you to believe in the existence of that transcendent sort of causation? The realist hereupon may reply: “Why, some of the data of consciousness are such as demand, as their sufficient cause, the existence of just such transcendent causality. For our idea of this transcendent causality is an idea that in itself needs a cause. And of this idea the transcendent causality is the only sufficient cause.” I answer, at once: The infinite regress is under way. You are no whit forwarder. You have not begun to show how the transcendent explains anything. For you explain the data by a transcendent x only because the relation of causality is said to be sure and to imply x. Asked, however, to explain your assurance of this transcendent causality, you say that there surely must be some transcendent cause for our experienced assurance of causality. And thus you may continue as long as you please.

The first argument of our realist, when closely viewed, thus involves either an infinite regress, or else an appeal to conceptions which our former account of reality as being “the content of actual and of pos-