Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/42

25 Imagination, and not of the unaided sensations, nor of the unaided reason. Self-pinching and contact with the rough external world might convince the child that he was different from his environment at the time when he made his last experiments and underwent his last experiences; but they could not convince him that he is different now, or that he will be different in the next instant; and for this conviction he depends upon faith. Again, the imagination of the "I" seems closely bound up with two other nearly simultaneous imaginations, those of Force and Cause. First he feels a desire to touch the inkstand, then he feels himself moving towards the inkstand, then he feels the inkstand touched. These sequences of desire, action, result, he can repeat as often as he likes. By their frequency therefore, as well as by their vividness, they impress him more powerfully than sequences of phenomena not dependent on himself; and it is from these probably that he first imagines the idea of "must," or "necessity," or "cause and effect." If he feels a desire to move a limb, the motion of the limb immediately follows; it always obeys him; it must obey him. He pushes a brick; what caused the brick to fall? He feels that it was his own force that caused it; he no longer looks upon the push and the fall as if the former merely preceded the latter; he imagines a connection of necessity between the push and the fall, the cause and the effect, and gradually comes to imagine himself as the causer of the cause. But all these imaginations are mere imaginations, not proofs. To gather together all the sensations of which he retains the memory, the sensations of which he is at present conscious, and the sensations to which he looks forward, and to put an "I" behind or below all these, as the foundation of them all, and partial causer of them all—what an audacious assumption is this! Not Plato and Aristotle combined could prove to a child, or to the most