Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/239

178 Causality; and this, empiricism has condemned as having no basis in fact — as being the creature of “fantasy.” Hence all perception — all experience, even to its simplest item — is itself dissipated and reduced to illusion.

The flat contradiction between this and the empirical principle, which derives its whole force from the assumed absoluteness of the single sensation, is obvious. Hume is thus the instrument of bringing about a curious result — that a principle should disappear by merely being taken in full earnest and carried out with unflinching consistency. What he has really done, and quite irrefutably, is to remove in this way the empirical principle finally; or, rather, he has simply let the principle dialectically remove itself. True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying that deserves to become classic, “Our unconditioned universality is the ground of our existence,” — its ground, that is, at once its necessary condition and its sufficient reason.