the horses; and note how this belief, accepted on the authority of grooms and coachmen, is repeated by their educated employers—as I lately heard it repeated by an American general, and agreed in by two retired English officials. Clearly, the readiness to admit, on such evidence, that such a cause can produce such an effect, implies a consciousness of causation which, even qualitatively considered, is of the crudest kind. And such a consciousness is, indeed, everywhere betrayed by the superstitions prevalent more or less among all classes.
Hence we must infer that the uncompared and unanalyzed observations men make, in the course of their dealings with things around, do not suffice to give them wholly-rational ideas of the process of things. It requires that physical actions shall be critically examined, the factors and results measured, and different cases contrasted, before there can be reached clear ideas of necessary causal dependence. And thus to investigate physical actions is the business of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences. Every experiment which the physicist or the chemist makes brings afresh before his consciousness the truth, given countless times in his previous experiences, that from certain antecedents of particular kinds there will inevitably follow a particular kind of consequent; and that, from certain amounts of the antecedents, the amount of the consequent will be inevitably so much. The habit of thought generated by these hourly-repeated experiences, always the same, always exact, is one which makes it impossible to think of any effect as arising without a cause, or any cause as expended without an effect; and one which makes it impossible to think of an effect out of proportion to its cause, or a cause out of proportion to its effect.
While, however, study of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, carried on experimentally, gives clearness and strength to the consciousness of causation, taken alone it is inadequate as a discipline; and, when pursued exclusively, generates a habit of thought which betrays into erroneous conclusions when higher orders of phenomena are dealt with. The process of physical inquiry is essentially analytical; and the daily pursuit of this process generates two tendencies—the tendency to contemplate separately the factors of phenomena, which it is the aim of inquiry to disentangle, and identify, and measure, and the tendency to rest in the results of such inquiry as though they were the final results to be sought. The chemist, by saturating, neutralizing, decomposing, precipitating, and at last separating, is enabled to measure what quantity of this element had been held in combination by a given quantity of that; and, when, by some alternative course of analysis, he has verified the result, his inquiry in so far is concluded: as are kindred inquiries respecting the other affinities of the element, when they are qualitatively and quantitatively determined in like ways. His habit is to get rid of, or neglect as much as possible, the concomitant disturbing factors, and to ascertain the nature and amount of some one and then of some other; and his end is reached when accounts have been
