ries which have been built upon them seem calculated finally to degrade the human intellect below that which is in beasts. Their object is to refute first principles, and accordingly, they neither are, nor can be themselves founded upon any principle except that of universal doubt. They tell us that we can draw no conclusion concerning unknown powers or existences, and that we must consider all nature as consisting in a mere chain of events, concerning the connexion of which (being incomprehen sible) we have no knowledge, and can entertain no belief; and that to assert the production of one thing by any intrinsic or derivative agency in another, is to speak without a meaning. Such, indeed, are the doctrines of causation, which, propounded among the sceptical doubts of a demyatheist, have been passionately embraced and carried to a greater degree of extravagance by a moral philosopher, who has vainly laboured to reconcile them with the doctrines of theism. But we hope to show that those systems which are directed against the universal sentiments, the original and primary persuasions of mankind, proceed not from superior knowledge, nor from any singularly perspicuous detection of mental delusions, but really from ignorance of what it is in which knowledge consists, and of the proper subject-matter of assent: and we solicit the attention of the reader to the remainder of this in which we shall endeavour to expose the fallacy of this celebrated theory, to trace its progress

essay,

from the maxims which we have been opposing, and to point out the dangerous consequences, as well as manifest absurdities to which it leads.

a

Mr. Hume has in many of his abstract speculations emphatically asserted this doctrine, that experience is the sole rule of reasoning upon matters of fact. Arguments à priori, those which are popularly and with some incorrectness, as well as those which are strictly so called, were in all disquisitions upon such subjects regarded by that philosopher with contempt, and he seems to have looked upon that faculty, whether we call it reason or by any other name, by which the affairs of life are regulated, and the judgment of events and probabilities determined, as nothing more than an instinctive disposition of the mind to expect for the future, events similar with those which have appeared in the past; in short, he considers custom, (by which he seems to designate a particular influential power or principle of mind,) as the rule and measure, the source, and also the extreme limit of every correct process of inductive reasoning. According to these principles he supposes, of course, that a child who has only once put its hand into a fire, will have no objection to try the experiment again, until repeated pain and burns teach him by experience the invariable result. Dr. Thomas Brown, in successfully opposing that opinion, has detected an inaccuracy, which, indeed, a metaphysician only could have overlooked. He alludes to the circumstance of an

a See Note (4) at the end of the Work.

expectation, which he conceives to be intuitive, that similar events will follow similar, and admits that a child who has once been burned, will ever after dread the fire. There must have been experience of the fact, no doubt, before we could know even that motion would ensue from the stroke of one body against another. But upon an observation of this kind being once made, we can, and we do in most cases infer, (without that further experience which Mr. Hume requires, namely, customary or habitual experience,) that the same consequence will always follow. Both these metaphysicians however, seem, notwithstanding their numerous retractations and softenings, to agree in maintaining, that the relation of cause and effect is but the invariable appearance of one event after another, without any power in the cause to produce its consequent; and the reasoning employed for this purpose derives its whole force from this delusive maxim, that nothing should be believed to exist, the nature of which we cannot explain or comprehend. The only difference, therefore, which appears to have engaged those philosophers, is whether we form just anticipations of the future from an instinctive expectation, or from experience, that the laws of nature are fixed. Mr. Hume has indeed (as Dr. Brown remarks) failed completely in his attempt to maintain the sufficiency of experience, since whether we ground our judgment upon one or many experiments of the qualities of things, we must still revert to an expectation that

T

a Vide Note (4) at the end of the Work.

the course of events is not altogether casual and variable. Experience alone can never apply to the future, and it can only be from an intuitive belief, of the similarity of events, and of uniformity in the powers of nature, that we conclude the sun will rise to-morrow, because it has risen every morning for 6000 years.. This, it would appear, is the only circumstance in which the two philosophers invariably and une, quivocally disagree; and although there is a confusion in both, from which an ill-natured critic might easily extract numerous expressions irreconcileable with their negative, and scarcely intelligible doctrines, yet in no part of his essays has Mr. Hume so totally rejected the actual existence of an operative cause, as it is positively denied in the fol lowing dogma of Brown :-"To me, indeed, it ap pears so very obvious a truth, that the substances which exist in nature, the world, its living inhabi, tants, and the adorable Being who created them, are all the real existences in nature, and that in the va rious changes which occur, therefore, there can as little be any powers or susceptibilities different from the antecedents and consequents themselves, as there can be forms different from the co-existing particles which constitute them, that to labour thus to impress this truth upon your mind, seems to me almost like an attempt to demonstate a self-evident proposition." Nevertheless, that the opinions of this author may have coincided with those vulgar sentiments which he labours so industriously to refute, seems possible enough, since his fluent recapitulations are oftentimes

so qualified as to make it very questionable, whether or not his doctrine is renounced by them, or diverted from its professed purpose. But to discuss all these particulars would lead us from a brief essay to a volume, and therefore we must refrain from any further observations than such as relate to the radical mistake of his theory. Nothing spins out criticism to so great a length as the satisfactory exposure of falsehood stated in equivocal expressions, and the detection of sophistry which consists not in altogether false reasoning or false premises, but in the inference itself being inapplicable to those tenets, which it may seem, and which it is adduced to establish.

Now we frankly acknowledge, that it is no inconsiderable satisfaction to find the proposer of so monstrous a paradox, himself furnishing the materials for its refutation. Mr. Hume's theory is indeed very erroneous, but it is neither so dogmatically propounded, so manifestly dangerous, nor so distinctly inconsistent with the universal knowledge and feelings of mankind, as the system of his refuter is.

For since it is maintained by Brown, that we have an intuitive expectation of the future from a single experiment, a circumstance which forms no part of Mr. Hume's reflections-an expectation, for instance, that gunpowder will always be combustible, after having once observed it to ignite upon the presence of a spark; how, we inquire, can this expectation exist or be maintained without some notion being conceived of inevitable and regulated connexion between the antecedent and its consequent, so long as the present