et seqq., he rightly defines the ratio cognoscendi as a condition of the proposition; but in an example, § 125, he nevertheless confounds it with cause.

Lambert, in the new Organon, does not mention Wolf's distinctions; he shows, however, that he recognizes a difference between reason of knowledge and cause; 1 for he says that God is the principium essendi of truths, and that truths are the principia cognoscendi of God.

Plattner, in his Aphorisms, § 868, says: "What is called reason and concl .sion within our knowledge (principium cognoscendi, ratio―rationatum), is in reality cause and effect (causa efficiens-effectus). Every cause is a reason, every effect a conclusion." He is therefore of opinion that cause and effect, in reality, correspond to the conceptions reason and consequence in our thought; that the former stand in a similar relation with respect to the latter as substance and accident, for instance, to subject and predicate, or the quality of the object to our sensation of that quality, &c. &c. I think it useless to refute this opinion, for it is easy to see that premisses and conclusion in judg ments stand in an entirely different relation to one another from a knowledge of cause and effect; although in individual cases even knowledge of a cause, as such, may be the reason of a judgment which enunciates the effect."

§ 12. Hume.

No one before this serious thinker had ever doubted what follows. First, and before all things in heaven and on earth, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason in the form of the Law of Causality. For it is a veritas æterna: i.e. it is in and by itself above Gods and Fate; whereas everything else, the understanding, for instance, which thinks

'Lambert, "New Organon,” vol. i. § 572.

that principle, and no less the whole world and whatever may be its cause-atoms, motion, a Creator, et cætera-is what it is only in accordance with, and by virtue of, that principle. Hume was the first to whom it occurred to inquire whence this law of causality derives its authority, and to demand its credentials. Everyone knows the result at which he arrives: that causality is nothing beyond the empirically perceived succession of things and states in Time, with which habit has made us familiar. The fallacy of this result is felt at once, nor is it difficult to refute. The merit lies in the question itself; for it became the impulse and starting-point for Kant's profound researches, and by their means led to an incomparably deeper and more thorough view of Idealism than the one which had hitherto existed, and which was chiefly Berkeley's. It led to transcendental Idealism, from which arises the conviction, that the world is as dependent upon us, as a whole, as we are dependent upon it in detail. For, by pointing out the existence of those transcendental principles, as such, which enable us to determine à priori, i.e. before all experience, certain points concerning objects and their possibility, he proved that these things could not exist, as they present themselves to us, independently of our knowledge. The resemblance between a world such as this and a dream, is obvious.

§ 13. Kant and his School.

1

Kant's chief passage on the Principle of Sufficient Reason is in a little work entitled "On a discovery, which is to permit us to dispense with all Criticism of Pure Reason." Section I., lit. A. Here he strongly urges the distinction between "the logical (formal) principle of cognition. 'every proposition must have its reason,' and the transcen

1 "Ueber eine Entdeckung, nach der alle Kritik der reinen Vernunft entbehrlich gemacht werden soll.”