Page:Journal of Speculative Philosophy Volume 16.djvu/219

intuition of the human mind, nor yet a universal mode of viewing things, for both of these imply the reality of substantial mind. Nor can it be a concept obtained from experience, and generalized by unconscious habit. For, in the first place, such a concept is necessarily subjective, and belongs only to the mind which framed it. It may or may not obtain as an objective relation among objective things. There is no ground for positing objective validity of any mental conception, except by a priori mind necessity, which a materialistic theory must reject. But, secondly, and chiefly, such a theory as to the origin of a knowledge of the causal nexus contains a petitio principii — i. e., it presupposes real causation to account for our knowledge of real causation. For this generalized belief, being a result of experience, is itself an effect of the phenomena given in experience. To ensure, therefore, that it is a true concept — i. e., one holding good objectively — we must assume that it was produced by a true causal nexus, which in turn is the thing to be accounted for. It certainly is begging the question to say that our knowledge that causation is real is a result of experience, when to prove that experience can produce a correct result we have to assume that very reality of causation which is to be proved. Nothing can be more illogical than to deduce knowledge of real causation from that which has for its own basis that same reality. After accounting for the one, the other still remains to be accounted for, which can be done only by reasoning in a circle. There is yet available one resource to materialism — to claim that, although our knowledge of true causation is not generalized from a series of experiences, it is obtained directly from the knowledge of phenomena — that in any two or more phenomena there is also given the causal nexus and the knowledge of it, Now, we might object to this, that it approached the position of the strictest intuitionalist, and that, as mere phenomena, there is in them nothing but the relation of co-existence and succession. Objective phenomena are not labelled " this is the cause of that;" and, therefore, if the mind thinks it finds in them such a relation, that relation must be brought to the phenomena by the mind itself. Or we might also say that, if a series of experiences is incompetent (as we have seen it is) to give a knowledge of causation, on a materialistic hypothesis, a fortiori, a single experience is. But waiving these, we have to see what is contained in this