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with efficient force is impossible to successful inquiry. The shadow of an object approaching us from the light, would thus be its cause; the effervescence of lime and water, the cause of the heat; the dissolving of salt in the water, the cause of the cold. The first fact, in each series of associated effects, would be the source of the remainder. No sequences are more fixed than those of day and night, summer and winter, yet there is no direct, causal connection be tween them, and no one ever so conceives the dependence.

Philosophy likewise reverts constantly to insensible, unapproachable causes. A large share of philosophers admit their existence and the grounds of it; and those of them who through their denial of the latter are content to sacrifice the former do not, and can not, use language, except in a few guarded passages, consistent with their own statements. They must, with Bain, in each inadvertent moment, speak of "active energy," of "mechanical powers," of "rousing the dormant energy," and to deny themselves these and kindred expressions, to forego the ideas back of them, would be to take away the opportunity of composition, or to make language most cumbersome, and untrue to our convictions. The generally accepted dogma, that the mind can not know anything beyond its own modifications; a dogma insisted on by many of the empirical school, finds its ultimate support in this notion of cause and effect. The existence of the object perceived outside of the perceptive organ, independent of it and removed from it at least by insensible distances has determined the large majority of philosophers to deny the possibility of direct perception. If, however, the connection of cause and effect is one of antecedence merely, then this separation of the object perceived from the organ perceiving it, should oppose no obstacle whatever to direct perception. A fixed sequence can be established between things remote and wholly unlike,