ridiculous existence which is the lot of all forms of superstition. We, the disciples of Jesus, have therefore not only the right but the duty of showing the scientific world that we retain our position in purity of conscience, enlightened by scholarship. We commence our inquiry with the consideration of the first objection. Miracles are impossible, since they destroy the fundamental principle of modern science-that of the absolutely unalterable and all-embracing Law of Causation. Before we reply to this objection we must arrive at an understanding with our opponents on two preliminary questions: 1. What is to be understood by the Law of Causation ? We commence with the first question: What is to be understood by the Law of Causation? By Causality or Natural Law we indicate that well-grounded deduction which rests on the innumerable facts of experience, namely: 1. That every occurrence in the world of nature has a corresponding cause. 2. That the same causes have the same effects in all cases; or otherwise expressed, that all occurrences in actuality follow one another according to a certain unalterable rule. For the elucidation of this second definition we give several illustrations, which may be multiplied at will. A stone, allowed to drop from a tower, finding no other resistance than that of the pressure of the air, falls always in the direction of the earth's centre. The direction of the stone's descent is therefore according to an invariable rule. Water freezes at 32° Fahr.; nitroglycerine explodes with intensest violence under sudden heat of about 420° Fahr. or by means of impact or pressure of a certain force. Strychnine, administered in a certain dose, always causes the death of the person concerned. As soon as we know these rules of consecutive action, we are in possession of a limited power of natural prophecy. We are able, that is, as soon as an event takes place-such as the swallowing of a certain dose of strychnine by anyone-to predict with certainty in every case the result, viz., the death of the person concerned. Let us examine the second question-How does modern science establish its foundation principle of the absolute validity of the Law of Causation? The investigator represents human reason, methodically trained. It is well, therefore, first to inquire what impressions are made upon the less cultivated, the simple person, or even upon the brute beast by the fact of Natural Law. We commence with brute creation. It is an incontrovertible fact that the brute creation has a sort of intuition concerning those fixed rules by which the processes of Nature are governed. We give some instances of this statement. No one would believe that the pike stands on a very high plane of brute intelligence. Yet the Berlin zoologist, Möbius, relates the following interesting observations with a pike. A bowl of water was divided into two contiguous compartments by a piece of glass. On the one side was a pike, on the other a variety of small living creatures specially to his taste. The pike went straight for his prey, but received for his pains, not the expected bonne bouche, but a disquieting shock from the invisible piece of glass. After repeating the process for some time, the pike finally learnt to deny himself. Several weeks after, the glass division was removed. The pike now swam freely amongst the other creatures. But it never entered his head to attack them. He had-if in this case without justification-apparently made a "Law of Nature" for himselfnamely, that to attack his prey resulted in a revengeful blow upon himself. Brutes have, like men, the power of holding impressions in the memory. The dog will recollect his master after years of separation. Without this feature of animal intelligence the circus performances for which animals are trained would be impossible. Animals are therefore able to note the sequence by which events follow one upon the other according to natural processes. They can, under certain conditions, by a mechanical instinct, reproduce this sequence by means of the rules impressed in their memory. If a dog has been often struck by his master, he knows, by experience, the regular sequence of events: the raised whip, the pain that follows. And every time that the master raises the whip, instinctively, that is, involuntarily and unconsciously, the sensation of the approaching pain forces itself upon him. The dog betrays this feeling plainly by his plaintive cries and crouchings, before even the blow has descended. He anticipates the blow with certainty. Indeed he already feels it, as if it had taken place, even though it may possibly not take place at all. The dog places the once experimentally acquired rule that the same cause has always the same effect in the service of his practical policy. When he learnt to "beg" his master always rewarded the completion of his performance by a dainty morsel. The dog came to connect in his memory the two ideas: " "beg -dainty morsel. After a time he comes to "beg" without being told, when he sees the morsel ready. The dog satisfies the condition that of begging-and expects on the round of experience the consequence thereof the reception of the desired morsel. The eminent English philosopher, David Hume, justly maintains, therefore, in his penetrating and epochal work, A Treatise on Human Nature, that the brute beast derives a fact directly from that which has acted upon its senses, and that this deduction rests entirely (?) upon past experience, since the beast expects the same consequences to follow the present happening which it has seen always to result from previous similar happenings. Now let us advance a further step and inquire what impression the primitive human being receives into his consciousness from the fact of Natural Law. Even the smallest child, slowly awakening into intelligence, is able to form an impression of the regularity of consecutive action in two related events. It experienced hunger and at first simply cried in sheer discomfort. This was always followed by the appearance of the mother with the bottle. It soon notes the connection of the two related occurrences, and for the future it uses its voice to summon mother and the bottle. A child of about a year old accidentally burns its finger on one of the grate-bars. It connects this thereafter with the sight of a grate-bar, which by mechanical instinct calls up the idea of heat, and excites fear and reluctance to touch the bar. Here we have the first psychological root of the principle of causation in the fact of the association of ideas. (a) We understand by "association of ideas" the involuntary and instinctive joining up of sensations and conceptions in the same consciousness: each observation showing experimentally the effort to call back to consciousness those mental images that have previously been connected either by space or time with the observation. For the elucidation of this sentence we mention some wellknown psychological facts. An old man, looking among his time-stained documents, setting them in order before he dies, suddenly lights on a longforgotten faded lock of hair; at once the precious vision of his early love starts up before his mind's eye. He lives again in that glad May morning on which he cut the lock from the girl's head. He sees again her smile, and the words they exchanged, forgotten for sixty years, awaken in his memory. Another instance: we have all suffered from a wound. Every sight of a wound hereafter forces upon our imagination the sense of pain. If we look at a bit of iron, we expect—and that for the same reason-to find it heavy. The observation of a piece of iron, that is, always excites in us on the ground of previous experience the conscious impression of weight. The "association of ideas" is, in opposition to the sense of causality, an involuntary mental act. It rests on strong instinct and operates mechanically. (b) A second equally psychological root of the idea of causation is the instinct of inquiry, possessed by every healthy human being. This sense is developed in people just as is the power of speech. As people carry their power of speech to varied degrees, so with the instinct of inquiry. The human mind is so fashioned that it is always asking Why?" This fact, like that of the association of ideas, is one that cannot be explained or traced to its origin, but can only and simply be recognized. The instinct of inquiry lends itself to confirmation most clearly in the case of novel experiences which occur in the sphere of human life. We may see it specially distinctly, for instance, in children of three or four years. As to these every object and occurrence is novel, their inquiring instinct finds most energetic play. They plague us adults a hundred times a day with their stereotyped repetition, "What is that?" "Why is this made so?" As the human mind by reason of its make-up is under the necessity of exercising its will in the direction of reasonable objects, so is it compelled in the same way to seek the cause of every object or occurrence. (e) The last root of the causal principle is that of a constantly repeated experimental fact: our instinct of inquiry finds satisfaction in constant experience: the mechanical course of our imaginative associations becomes more fully confirmed by the actual occurrences of the anticipated observations. Let us explain this more in detail. We have experienced that fire is hot. First our instinct of inquiry urges us to investigate the source of heat. It finds it close at hand in the fire. Thereafter whenever we see a fire we are compelled by the natural mechanism of our imaginative associations on the ground of former experience to anticipate the sensation of heat Each test confirms the correctness of our anticipation. Fire is experimentally always hot; and as this anticipation is without exception strengthened by innumerable experiences, it becomes by continued practice a mere matter of course, a second nature. We can then no longer doubt that fire and heat are inseparable, or as Kant and others have expressed it, they are "necessarily " united. However much the majority of unschooled scoffers may believe in this apparently necessary connection between cause and effect, they are just as little acquainted with the fundamental principle of modern science, viz., the " absolute" validity of the Law of Causation. The Berlin philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, well says in his Introduction to Philosophy:— "The whole of popular medicine consists of observed results: whether rightly or wrongly observed; that is, if one does this or that, then one catches cold or fever. If you have fever, you must sweat or be dosed, etc. Many feel no need of an explanation of the relationship between the allied phenomena. Nor are they upset at all if the means do not always cure. Their Law of Causation does not demand it. Its formula seems to be: This follows that generally, but sometimes it turns out otherwise. Indeed this formula corresponds to their demand. Practical life has always to do with consequences such as are only rules with exceptions and are not regardable as fixed laws: the peasant has to do with weather conditions and occurrences in organic life, which are variable and answer to his formula; the labourer with materials and tools which are not always of the same quality; the teacher, the official, with human constitutions which, alike in general features, have all their peculiarities and follow no identical line of action." It is certain that the simple-minded person, that is to say, the man unschooled in the spirit of modern science, knows nothing of an absolutely inviolable Natural Causation. This can be historically proved. We need only to call to mind the most hihgly cultivated types of classical antiquity. |