NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

of anything as absolutely commencing, because of this notion of cause and effect. The existence of the notion is the ground of our embarrassment, not the embarrassment the occasion of the notion. What would be simpler, were it not for causality crowding us backward, than merely to conceive any landscape, any personage, any event, with no thought of what has preceded it? The present act of the imagination is not conditioned on the past, neither should we be compelled to evoke the present from the past, any more than to carry it forward into the future, were it not for causation. Any cross-section of the events of time could be as complete as a single pebble on the shore.

Thus, often in dreams, when the imagination finds unrestrained phenomenal play, the judgment not being sufficiently active to impose the check of this purely sub-phenomenal idea of causation, we in a great measure disregard it, and, with no sense of jar, suffer the unexplained presence of unexpected persons, and an incongruous order and issue of events. The ideas regulative of space and time relations are present, while cause and effect, regulative of consecutive thought, is in whole or in part overlooked. A city makes its appearance suddenly, the ship moves unobstructedly across the land, the facts and figures of fancy come and go freely, bound to no ordinary sequence.

A second objection is found in the fact that the theory affords no explanation of the alternative adopted by it. We can neither conceive, it is said, the commencement, nor the non-commencement of anything. Very well, but how is this dilemma to be escaped by the present notion of causation. The conclusion accepted under it of " infinite noncommencement" remains as inconceivable as ever, and, therefore, as far as conception is concerned, presents as many difficulties as would the opposed alternative of an immediate, independent beginning of events. If the mind is as open