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PHYSICAL AND VITAL FORCES.

and polar (magnetism and electricity), while the latter embrace cohesion and affinity. The vibrations, moreover, are different intensities, as before stated. We have, therefore, three dif ferent genera of inorganic force, and at least five species.(1) Within a few years we confidently expected to find their respective lines of sequence converging at the farther limit of the phenomenal world; but here we are at that limit, and we find five separate threads of causation emerging from the realm beyond that boundary.

In addition to this, we have the phenomena of life, back of which we discern a force which, so far as we know, is not a transformation of any other form of force. True it is, that the vehicle, and instrument, and sensible expression of life is a material organism, whose building up is chiefly the work of molecular forces. True it is, that the mode of expression and manifestation of life is and must be co-ordinated to this sole and material medium of expression. But that which we call life plays the part of a force which conditions the activity of the molecular forces; has never been produced by the transmutation of any of them; can not be approached by any of the methods of physics, nor brought, like a physical force, within the grasp of numerical formulation.

The other point to be noted is, that the supreme, intelligent Spontaneity, as we are thus led by science and reason to think it, is revealed to us in our own mental constitution, whose laws

Mechanical force and motion, so far as I can see, are always effects of one or more of the above forms of force, or of animal volition, or of vital force.

ELEMENTS OF CAUSAL CONCEPT.

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afford us the only attainable ground of certainty; whose delegated spontaneity is a picture of the absolute Will; whose intelligence takes hold on the thoughts expressed in the cosmos, and finds them comprehensible, admirable, and satisfying; and whose conscience, while it finds among men the fitting theatre for its activities, discovers, in the supreme entity which we have disclosed, the sufficient ground for its authority and basis for its hopes.

Let me now attempt, in a concise manner, by way of recapitulation, to draw out in historical order the steps and circumstances in the genesis and constitution of our notion of causation in the existing universe.

1. I dismiss the consideration of all secondary causation. The phrase is a misnomer. There is no real cause which can be disclosed as an effect; first cause is only cause. That must be an intelligent spontaneity, and must act without intermediation or "instrumental causation."

2. The notion of causation implies correlative subjectivity and objectivity-a thing acting and a thing acted upon-a causative spontaneity and a possibility of its action otherwise than in and upon itself. In all causation, except a primordial creative act, objectivity is a reality—in primordial creation it is a potentiality. This dual necessity of subjective agent and objective possibility of effect implies, in every case of actual causative effort, a differentiation of active and passive existence; and hence renders irrational the theory of "monism" and its corollary "pantheism" under all its aspects.

3. The subject must be self-conscious — conscious of its own existence and power of determination. This necessity is the ground of "personality ;" and it implies that the subject is a "free agent."

4. The subject must form a concept of an effect—a thing not yet existing, or an event not yet enacted.

5. The subject must be conscious of the relation between effect

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sciousness.

ELEMENTS OF CAUSAL CONCEPT.

and cause the intuition of causality must arise in the conThis intuition certainly embraces the notion of efficiency and adequacy; and, in all cases of intermediate causation, it implies, also, that the effect must be congeneric with its cause. In intermediate causation we have merely a given energy transmitted-no new energy put forth. This must retain through an indefinite series of terms the same quality and quantity as belonged to the initial and only logically causative act. Original causation, on the contrary, is not bound by any qualitative relation between cause and effect-though, in the finite sphere, subject to other conditions which may variously restrict the field of effects.

6. The subject must be conscious of motive prompting to produce the effect conceived. There must always be a reason why an intelligence acts one way rather than another. This necessary reason why" is often styled the "final cause."

7. The subject may cognize a contingency existing—that is, a fact constant or varying which sustains some established relation to the effect contemplated. Such fact, if it exist, becomes a "condition or "conditioning cause.'

8. The subject must become conscious of the influence of the contingency (if it exist) upon the conscious motive-adding to or taking from it.

9. The subject must next be conscious of a desire to produce the effect conceived. This desire would be modified in a manner co-ordinated with the contingently modified motive.

10. The subject must next be conscious of a formed intention to produce the effect. "Intentionality," whose genesis arises at this point, incloses all the mental acts which precedeself-consciousness, intuition of causal relation, motivity, perception of conditionality (if existing), and desire (conditionally modified).

11. The subject must finally will the effect-modified by the contingent fact, if it exist.

FINITE CAUSATION.

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This is the whole process of original causation as represented in individual consciousness, which, unless the harmonies of the universe be fatally misleading, is the finite reflection of the method of infinite causation.

In the case, however, of finite causality, as in the human will, every effect external to the mind itself must be reached through instrumentalities. In most cases, the final determination does not reach immediately the external result toward which volition is ultimately directed. It reaches, nevertheless, another result which, however it may escape observation, is the effect which figures in the foregoing account. This effect is a muscular movement adapted to serve as the first term in the series of intermediate causes. After this, the whole history of causal efficiency, as above laid down, must necessarily be repeated for each separate term in the series of intermediate causes. In the mean time, complications arise. The instruments employed become effective on condition that the forces of nature prove regularly operative; and thus supreme causation may be summoned to conspire with human volition in the accomplishment of the most trivial result.

IS GOD COGNIZABLE BY REASON?(')

"Knowledge, accordingly, is characterized by faith; and faith, by a kind of divine, mutual, and reciprocal correspondence, becomes characterized by knowledge."-CLEMENS ALEX., Stromata, book ii., chap. iv.

"THE existence of God," writes one of the most original of the scholastic fathers, who is said to have rescued Aristotle from atheism and secured him for orthodoxy, "can be known by natural reason, as is said in the first of Romans; and this and other truths of the same kind are not properly so much articles of faith as preambles to these articles, our faith presupposing natural knowledge, as grace presupposes nature."(") This thought is the theme of the volume before us.

We have here a contribution to religious philosophy which is an honor to American letters. The treatment is worthy of the theme, and the theme is worthy of philosophy. It is an essay at the old problem so profoundly pondered by Socrates and Plato, Anselm and Leibnitz, Descartes and Newton, Barrow and Butler-the attempt to construct a formal proof of an affirmation which rises spontaneously in the human soul, and around which cluster the profoundest emotions and the highest hopes of humanity.

The lapse of twenty-five centuries has not diminished the interest of the human mind in the legitimate grounds of its irre

(1) "Christianity and Greek Philosophy; or, the Relations between Spontaneous and Reflective Thought in Greece and the Positive Teaching of Christ and his Apostles." By B. F. Cocker, D.D., Professor of Moral and Mental Philosophy in the University of Michigan. New York, 1870. (2) Aquinas, "Summa Theologiæ," art. iii., Quæst. 2.