NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

caption, "The relation of sequences." If these and other kindred statements are correct, then there is no veritable idea of cause and effect in the precise, intuitive sense, since a sequence finds explanation under the notion of time, and requires for its statement no other form of thought. That there is any sufficient knowledge or idea of the ground of such a sequence is simply denied by this class of philosophers. There is in this attitude an abandonment of the idea of causation as irresolvable into experience, and a substitution for it of a certain application of the notion of time. The ground of debate, therefore, is narrowed down to the correctness with which the phenomena under discussion are stated by the respective parties. If it be shown, that simple sequence does not, in the common mind, cover the entire ground of causation, there is in the empirical philosophy a surrender of one actual, universal idea as inexplicable; a superficial substitution for it of the fragment of another, and this for no other reason than that its own theory can find no place for this fixed conviction. It is the facts of the mind's action that philosophy inquires into, and the above proof being given, there will here be left a form of action as universal and persistent, and hence as ultimate and authoritative as any, uncovered by materialism.

The universal conviction, if it can be arrived at, is not to be pushed aside, to be left unexplained, nor to be regarded as an accidental, invalid movement of mind, without a reason rendered, distinguishing this from kindred affirmations of our faculties. We may not impeach the action of the mind at one point, without at least separating this point broadly and decisively from every other. These universal convictions are not to be obnoxious, merely because, as otherwise inexplicable, they demand the intuitive insight claimed for them. There is here really a priori conviction brought to disprove a priori truths; for what