sensations, the other primitive agents. "Our knowledge," says Royer-Collard, "consists in tracing ignorance as far back as possible."

Can we at least affirm that these irreducible data are so only in appearance, and in relation to our mind? Can we say that they have causes, like the derived facts of which they are the causes? Can we conclude that every event, always and everywhere, happens according to laws, and that this little world of ours, so well regulated, is a sort of epitome of the universe? Can we by aid of the axioms, quit our narrow confines, and affirm anything of the universe? In no wise; and it is here that Mill pushes his principles to their furthest consequences: for the law which attributes a cause to every event, has to him no other foundation, worth, or scope, than what it derives from experience. It has no inherent necessity; it draws its whole authority from the great number of cases in which we have recognised it to be true; it only sums up a mass of observations; it unites two data, which, considered in themselves, have no intimate connection; it joins antecedents generally to consequents generally, just as the law of gravitation joins a particular antecedent to a particular consequent; it determines a couple, as do all experimental laws, and shares in their uncertainty and in their restrictions. Listen to this bold assertion:

"I am convinced that any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his imagination has once learnt to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one, for instance, of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience, or in

our mental nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, reason for believing that this is nowhere the case. The grounds, therefore, which warrant us in rejecting such a supposition with respect to any of the phenomena of which we have experience, must be sought elsewhere than in any supposed necessity of our intellectual faculties."

1

Practically, we may trust in so well-established a law; but

"In distant parts of the stellar regions, where the phenomena may be entirely unlike those with which we are acquainted, it would be folly to affirm confidently that this general law prevails, any more than those special ones which we have found to hold universally on our own planet. The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise called the law of causation, must be received not as a law of the universe, but of that portion of it only which is within the range of our means of sure observation, with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, and to which, in the absence of any ground from experience for estimating its degree of probability, it would be idle to attempt to assign any."

We are, then, irrevocably driven back from the infinite; our faculties and our assertions cannot attain to it; we remain confined in a small circle; our mind reaches not beyond its experience; we can establish no universal and necessary connection between facts; such a connection probably does not even exist. Mill stops here; but certainly, by carrying out his idea to its full extent, we should arrive at the conception of the world as a mere collection of facts; no internal necessity would induce their connection or their existence; they would be simple arbitrary, accidentally-existing facts. 2 Ibid. ii. 104.

1 Mill's Logic, ii. 95.

Sometimes, as in our system, they would be fourd assembled in such a manner as to give rise to regular recurrences; sometimes they would be so assembled that nothing of the sort would occur. Chance, as Democritus taught, would be at the foundation of all things. Laws would be the result of chance, and sometimes we should find them, sometimes not. It would be with existences as with numbers-decimal fractions, for instance, which according to the chance of their two primitive factors, sometimes recur regularly, and sometimes not. This is certainly an original and lofty conception. It is the final consequence of the primitive and dominant idea, which we have discovered at the beginning of the system, which has transformed the theories of Definition, of Propositions, and of the Syllogism; which has reduced axioms to experimental truths; which has developed and perfected the theory of induction; which has established the goal, the limits, the province, and the methods of science; which everywhere, in nature and in science, has suppressed interior connections; which has replaced the necessary by the accidental; cause by antecedent; and which consists in affirming that every assertion which is not merely verbal forms in effect a couple, that is to say, joins together two facts which were separate by their nature.

§ 2. ABSTRACTION.

I.

The

An abyss of chance and an abyss of ignorance. prospect is gloomy: no matter, if it be true. At all events, this theory of science is a theory of English

science. Rarely, I grant you, has a thinker better

summed up in his teaching the practice of his country; seldom has a man better represented by his negations and his discoveries the limits and scope of his race. The operations, of which he constructs science, are those in which the English excel all others, and those which he excludes from science are precisely those in which the English are deficient more than any other nation. He has described the English mind whilst he thought to describe the human mind. That is his glory, but it is also his weakness. There is in your idea of knowledge a flaw of which the incessant repetition ends by creating the gulf of chance, from which, according to him, all things arise, and the gulf of ignorance, at whose brink, according to him, our knowledge ends. And see what comes of it. By cutting away from science the knowledge of first causes, that is, of divine things, you reduce men to become sceptical, positive, utilitarian, if they are cool-headed; or mystical, enthusiastic, methodistical, if they have lively imaginations. In this huge unknown void which you place beyond our little world, passionate men and uneasy consciences find room for all their dreams; and men of cold judgment, despairing of arriving at any certain knowledge, have nothing left but to sink down to the search for practical means which may serve for the amelioration of our condition. It seems to me that these two dispositions are most frequently met with in an English mind. The religious and the positive spirit dwell there side by side, but separate. This produces an odd medley, and I confess that I prefer the way in which the Germans have reconciled science with faith. But their philosophy is but badly written poetry.-Perhaps so.-But what they call reason, or intuition of principles, is only

the faculty of building up hypotheses.-Perhaps so.But the systems which they have constructed have not held their ground before experience. I do not defend what they have done.-But their absolute, their subject, their object, and the rest, are but big words.-I do not defend their style.-What, then, do you defend ?—Their idea of Causation.-You believe with them that causes are discovered by a revelation of the reason!-By no means.- -You believe with us that our knowledge of causes is based on simple experience ?-Still less.You think, then, that there is a faculty, other than experience and reason, capable of discovering causes?— Yes. You think there is an intermediate course between intuition and observation, capable of arriving at principles, as it is affirmed that the first is, capable of arriving at truths, as we find that the second is?—Yes.What is it? Abstraction. Let us return to your original idea; I will endeavour to show in what I think it incomplete, and how you seem to me to mutilate the human mind. But my argument will be the formal one of an advocate, and requires to be stated at length.

II.

Your starting-point is good: man, in fact, does not know anything of substances; he knows neither minds nor bodies; he perceives only transient, isolated, internal conditions; he makes use of these to affirm and name exterior states, positions, movements, changes, and avails himself of them for nothing else. He can only attain to facts, whether within or without, sometimes transient, when his impression is not repeated; sometimes permanent, when his impression many times