Page:Treatise of Human Nature (1888).djvu/671

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A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE.

Calm—passions, to be distinguished from weak, 419 (cf. 631), confounded with reason, 417, 437 (cf. 583).

Cartesian—argument on power or efficacy, 159; argument to God, 160.

Cause.

§ 1. Impressions the cause of ideas because constantly conjoined with and prior to them, 5; one object the cause of another when it produce either the actions and motions or the existence of the other, or when it has a power of producing it, is (cf. 172).

§ 2. Cause and etfcct a quality of ideas producing association, 11, 101; causation associates ideas but not impressions, 283; a natural as well as a philosophical relation, 15, 94; definitions of cause as a natural and philosophical relation, 170; property a particular species of causation, 310, 506.

§ 3. Causation a relation which is a source of probability (cf. 124, 153) discovered by reasoning, because 'the mind goes beyond what is immediately present to the sense,' 73 (cf. 103, 141); it is the only relation which 'inform us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel,' 74.

§ 4. The origin of our ideas of causation to be found in some impressions, 74 (cf. 165); but there is 'no one quality which universally belongs to all beings and gives them a title' to be called causes: therefore the idea must be derived from some relation among objects, 75; now the relations of contiguity (cf. 100) and succession in time are essential to that of causation, 76 (but relation of causation exists between taste or smell and colour of a fruit because they are inseparable, though coexistent in general and also contemporaneous in their appearance in the mind, 237, 238); also the relation of 'necessary connexion,' 'for an object may be contiguous and prior to another without being considered as its cause,' 77 (cf. 87); but it is impossible to discover directly the impression from which the idea of necessary connexion is derived, 77.

§ 5. [Law of Causation.] So we ask indirectly (a) why a cause is always necessary, i.e. 'why it is necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause,' 78 f., 157 (cf. 172); this is neither intuitively nor demonstratively certain, 79; it is not contradictory or absurd to separate the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, 80; weakness of Hobbes' and Clarke's demonstration of necessity of a cause, 80, of Locke's argument, 81, of the argument from cause and effect being correlative, 82; this opinion therefore based on 'observation and experience,' 82; this leads to the further question (b) 'why we conclude that such particular causes have such particular effects, and why we form an inference from one to the other,' 82.

§ 6. A. The argument from effect to cause requires somewhere an impression of the senses or memory, 83 (cf. 97), or of the imagina-