So also we have no mode of defining our sensations but by stating the occasions in which we are conscious of them. For instance, whiteness is the sensation we have when we look at snow, and blackness is the sensation we have when we look at charcoal.
The same idea of causation and power in ourselves which we have when we make changes by our will, we always connect with any thing which by experiment and testimony we find, in given circumstances, to be an invariable antecedent of a given change. Our minds are so made, that whenever we find an invariable antecedent of a given change, we can not help believing that this antecedent produced the change, just as we believe our own will produces changes in our bodies and in things around us. And if any person [pg 046] were to talk and act as if lie did not believe this, be would be regarded as having “lost his reason.”
Moreover, whenever men, by frequent experiments, find that a given change is invariably preceded by a certain antecedent, they can not help believing that the antecedent has power to produce this change, and that the thing changed has no power to do otherwise. This idea of power and want of power always exists whenever men find an invariable antecedent to some change. It is by finding what are thus invariably connected as antecedents and consequents that men learn what are causes, and what are effects, and what are the powers of things around us.
Here, then, we have these as principles of common sense believed by all men, viz.:
1. Every change (in matter or mind) has a producing cause as an antecedent.
2. Every invariable antecedent of an invariable sequent is a producing cause, and the thing changed has no power to refrain from that change.
3. A producing cause, in appropriate circumstances, has power to make a given change.
Now every man, however unlearned, can judge for himself whether these principles of common sense exist in his own mind, as here set forth. For example, let any person take a magnet and discover, day after day, that when it is placed near a piece of iron it draws it to itself; let him find also, by testimony from others, that this is invariable and fails in not a single instance, and the inevitable result is a belief that the magnet is the cause of the moving of the iron, just as the mind is the cause of the movement of our bodies. So also there is a belief that the magnet, in given circumstances, [pg 047] has power to move the iron, as our will has power to move our body. So also there is a belief that the piece of iron, in the given circumstances, has no power to refrain from being thus attracted.
We see, then, that it is a universal fact, that when there is a change of any thing, or any new mode of existence, every sane man believes there is some producing cause of this change. Even the youngest child exhibits this principle as a part of its mental organization. And should a person be found who was destitute of a belief in this truth, so that he should talk and act as if things came into existence and were changing places and forms without any causes, he would be called insane, or a man who had “lost his reason.”
Our minds being endowed with this principle, we find the world around us to be a succession of changes which we trace back to preceding causes, until we come to the grand question, “Who, or what first started this vast system of successive changes?” Only two replies are conceivable. The first is that of the Atheist, who, contradicting his own common sense, maintains that, in some past period, all this vast system of organization and changes began to exist without any cause. The other reply is, that there is a great, eternal, self-existent First Cause, who himself never began to be, and who is the author of all finite existences. This being, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, we call God.