Synopsis
Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1882. Excerpt: ... PROGRESS. CAUSALITY. * Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow." Cowpeb. "Coming events cast their shadows before." Campbell. "We find in the constant harmony of nature a sufficient proof in favour of the immutability of its laws. Every miracle would involve their infraction--a process to which nature would submit as little as to any other intervention in its empire, in which everything, from the gnat which dances in the sunbeam, up to the human mind, which issues from the brain, is governed by fixed principles."--Tuttle. "causality" is that faculty of the human mind which impresses its possessor with an irresistible conviction that every phenomena or change in nature is caused by something, and hence, by successive steps, it leads us to the " First Cause" of all. It is the reasoning faculty by means of which, looking at the actions of men, we are able to consider the motives, or moving causes, from which their actions proceed; it is the faculty which looks beyond the surface, and perceives the dependence of phenomena, and explains to mankind that what seems mere juxtaposition or coincidence is caused by that invisible bond of connection we call "cause and effect." Without it, a juryman has great difficulty in convicting on circumstantial evidence; without it, men are blind to remote consequences, and are apt to stigmatize as visionary all intellectual perceptions which then- own minds cannot reach ; without it, men reject principle as vain theory, and are captivated by "expedients," and represent those as the beau ideal of practical wisdom. Causality is opposed to dogmas and creeds, reason seeing in such but obstinate stumbling-blocks to progress. Causality has weakened, an...
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