Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 24:94 (Apr 1867)
Article: Cause And Effect
Author: John Bascom

BSac 24:94 (April 1867) p. 296

Cause And Effect

Rev. John Bascom

It is not uncommon in philosophy to build structures on foundations whose existence is denied. His action, who, mounted on a pyramid of boxes, requested his companion to pluck away the first and pass it up, that he might by means of it climb higher, though too coarse a joke for practical life, is often realized with the more subtile, illusory supports of metaphysics. The juggler, at the end of a surprising performance, shows his hands still tied as satisfactory proof that he has had no part in it; yet remove him bodily and his tricks are sure to go with him. Many a fine-spun philosophical theory is indebted for its very existence to faculties whose function and office it is its chief business to disprove. Bind the mental powers beyond escape that have played an unobserved part in the construction of these hypotheses, and they would lose all coherence and firmness, and pass from sight like vapor.

The illustration of this class of theories which we have more particularly in mind, is that which denies the validity of the notion of cause and effect; which regards it as merely the unverified force assumed in explanation of the observed fact of stated antecedents. Sequence is all that is seen, all that is known, and any notion of a necessary link between

BSac 24:94 (April 1867) p. 297

the consequent and the antecedent, a dependence 01 the one upon the other, is a mere notion arising in the mind as something beyond what it knows—a fictitious solution which it gives to phenomena in themselves naked and void of the idea. This denial is most essential and central to idealism, and leads to those other denials which so completely divorce this philosophy from common experience, sympathy, and even comprehension. This school of metaphysicians emasculate knowledge at once by this rejection of the primary nexus of things. They may go on with Mill to construct a logic of *the inductive sciences; yet these sciences will owe their entire interest and growth to the discarded idea of cause and effect, to a belief in forces that may be known, and whose action may be duly experienced. They may proceed with Herbert Spencer to give first principles, to treat psychology and biology, and still their language will be dripping full of the rejected notion of efficient forces. It is superfluous to give passages from writers of this class implying this idea of force, when their entire works, with the exception of a few eccentric and guarded definitions, are filled with them; when it is impossible for them to use current or to invent and steadily employ a new speech excluding the speech notion of causation.

We may define matter as “the permanent possibility of certain phenomena,” but we shall never handle it, us...