Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics / With Some of Their Applications

by William Thomas Thornton

Again, and above all, does not anatomy teach us that when the mind wills the movement of any bodily member, it 'is not the member itself which is immediately moved, but certain intervening nerves, muscles, and animal spirits, or possibly something still more minute and more unknown,' through which the motion is successively propagated until it reach the member? So that when the mind wills one event, a series of other events, quite different and quite unthought of, take place instead; and it is only by their means that the will's purpose is finally achieved. But how can the mind be conscious, how can it form the remotest conception, of a power which not only never does what the mind desires, but never does aught of which the mind is cognisant?

And as we are thus utterly unable to perceive any power that the mind has over the body, so are we equally unconscious of any power of the mind over itself. We know as little of its internal nature and constitution as we do of its mode of connection with the body. We know by experience that at the bidding of the will ideas are continually brought forward; but by what means they are brought forward we are absolutely ignorant, as we are also of the reasons of the fluctuation of mental activity, and why mental operations are more vigorous in health than in sickness, before breakfast than after a heavy dinner or deep carouse.

Such, on the issue immediately before us, is Hume's reasoning, to which—though necessarily very greatly condensing it—I shall, I am sure, be acknowledged to have conscientiously striven to do full justice, by bringing all its points into the strongest light, and arranging them in the most effective order. Still, with its utmost strength thus displayed before us, we are fully warranted in asserting à priori that its whole utmost strength is weakness. If, by following a leader who has engaged to conduct us to a certain spot, we find ourselves at our journey's end in a quite different place, no appeal that the guide can make to maps or finger-posts will persuade us that he has not mistaken the way. Nor need our judgment be otherwise, even though our guide be Hume, if, having started with him in pursuit of truth, we are finally landed in a patent absurdity. With all due respect for logic, we protest with Tony Lumpkin against being argufied out of our senses, as we plainly should be if we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that whenever we use the words power or connection we have no idea thereto correspondent. Since, then, Hume tells us this, we may be quite sure that he has been deluded by some fallacy which may be detected by adequate search; and being, moreover, sensible that we really have the idea our possession of which is denied by him, we may be equally sure that the original of which the idea is a copy is similarly discoverable. In sooth, neither the one nor the other is far to seek. The fallacy consists simply in confusion of the definite with the indefinite article. The original of our idea of power Hume himself indicates even while rejecting it. Although constrained by Hume's demonstration to confess that we cannot even conjecture of what kind is the authority which the will exercises over the limbs, we are not the less sensible that it does exercise an authority of some sort or other, which they are unable to disobey. We know that in ordinary circumstances our limbs will move when we wish them to move, and will remain quiet when we wish them not to move. Nor this only. We moreover know, or at any rate fancy we know, that they would not have moved unless we had wished them. In examples like these of volitions followed, as the case may be, by premeditated motion or rest, we have something more than the simple sequence observable in the succession of external events. We do not perceive simply that, as when fire is lighted, heat is emitted, so when the mind wills the body moves. We perceive clearly that there must be a connection of some sort between antecedent and consequent, without which the first certainly would not and, we fancy, could not have followed the first. We perceive, in short, that the second followed because the first preceded. If fire were an animated being, capable of forming and manifesting volitions; and if we observed that whenever it wished to emit heat, heat was emitted; and that whenever it wished to withhold heat, heat was withheld; and if we were thereupon to say that fire has the power of emitting or withholding heat at its pleasure, our words surely would not be destitute of signification; they would certainly possess some meaning, and that a very obvious one. And so they as certainly do when we say that the mind has power over those bodily movements which we observe to take place and to cease in constant conformity with its will. I am not saying that what they mean is necessarily truth—we will come to that presently—all I say as yet is, that they mean something, and that that something, whether it be a real or only an imaginary perception, is perfectly fitted to be the original of that idea of 'power' connecting cause and effect, or of 'connection' between cause and effect, which Hume maintains does not exist, because there is no original from which it can have been copied. It matters not that we are quite ignorant of what nature is the something from which our idea of power possessed by the mind over the body is derived, and which, for aught we know, may reside, not in the mind, but in the body, and may consist, not of any strength inherent in the former, but of loyalty and docility inherent in the latter. Just as the authority of a popular general over a well-disciplined army is not the less real because the soldiers, every one of whose lives is at the general's disposal, might, if so inclined, mutiny en masse, so it can make no difference in the mind's power over the body whether the mind be intrinsically able to enforce obedience, or the limbs be so constituted as to be unable to disobey. As little does it matter that we are also ignorant of the mode in which the mind's behests are communicated to the members. It is not the less certain that in some mode or other they are communicated. Neither does it signify more that the mind does not communicate directly with the part of the body which it desires to influence, and acts upon that part only by means of action propagated through a series of intervening parts; or that it is able to direct only some organs, and not others, or cannot direct even those, if by some accident they have become seriously deranged. A strong-armed blockhead is not the less obviously able to pump up water because the terms 'muscular contractility' and 'atmospheric pressure' are as heathen Greek to him; or because the pump-handle, which alone is directly moved by him, touches, not the water itself, but only the first link in a chain of mechanism connecting it with the water; or because, if the sucker of the pump got choked, or the well were to dry up, it would be vain for him to go on moving the pump-handle. Blockhead as he is, nothing of all this in the least diminishes his conviction that as long as the pump continues in order and there remains water in the well, he can oblige the water to rise by moving the pump-handle; nor can anything analogous prevent the mind from feeling that whenever, in ordinary circumstances, it wills that the limbs be moved, the limbs not only will be moved, but cannot help being moved accordingly. But it is simply impossible that, from the exercise of volitions which it knows will be obeyed, the mind should not receive the sensation of exercising causal power; and having thus got the sensation, it has nothing to do but to copy the sensation in order to get the idea of causal power. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte; the first step being taken the others cost nothing. The mind having, by introspection of its own operations, discovered what Hume, though professing to look in the same direction, unaccountably contrived to overlook—the idea, namely, of causal power—proceeds to apply that idea to the connection of external phenomena. Not only do we, whenever we see a horse or an ox walking of its own accord, infer that the animal walks because it wishes to walk; but having observed that, when a stone is thrown into the air it invariably falls presently afterwards towards the ground; that a magnet invariably attracts any light piece of iron placed near it; that red-hot coals always burn; and that water always moistens, we infer that the second constituent of each brace of phenomena takes place because of the first, meaning thereby that there is some strong bond connecting the two and compelling one to follow the other. If called upon to justify this inference, we may do so by reducing to absurdity its only possible alternative. If there be supposed to be no connection between two phenomena constituting one of those invariable sequences which we are accustomed to denominate cause and effect, the sequence which they constitute must needs be an unconnected sequence, and the only reason for styling one of the phenomena a cause is, that it is an antecedent which the other invariably follows. But according to this, as has been pointed out over and over again, day would be the cause of night, and night the cause of day, and tidal flux and reflux likewise would be each other's causes; and Mr. J. S. Mill has therefore proposed to interpolate a word, and to define the cause of a phenomenon as 'the antecedent on which it (the phenomenon) is invariably and unconditionally consequent.'[30] I must, however, confess myself unable to perceive how the definition is improved by this emendation. There is not, and cannot possibly be, such a thing as unconditionally invariable sequence, as, indeed, Mr. Mill himself virtually admits by expressly assuming as an indispensable condition of all causation that 'the present constitution of things endure.' But if, notwithstanding the presence of this indispensable condition, it be permissible to call any sequence unconditionally invariable, then the sequences of night upon day and of day upon night are such sequences, and day and night continue consequently entitled to be styled each other's causes as much under the amended as under the original definition. For as long as 'the present constitution of things endures,' that is, as long as the earth continues to revolve on its axis, and the sun continues to shine, and no opaque substance intervenes between earth and sun, day and night will continue to be as invariably and unconditionally each other's antecedents as sunlight will continue to be the antecedent or concomitant of day. True, Mr. Mill denies that the earth's diurnal motion is part of the present constitution of things, because, according to him, 'nothing can be so called which might possibly be terminated or altered by natural causes:' but, if so, then neither ought sunlight to be so called, for it too quite possibly may, nay, in the opinion of many philosophers, most certainly will, be extinguished eventually by natural causes. If day ought not to be called the unconditionally invariable consequent of night merely because it would cease to be so if the earth were to cease turning on its axis, then neither ought it to be called the unconditionally invariable consequent of the unshrouded proximity of the sun, inasmuch as it would cease to be thereupon consequent if the sun were to become burnt out. If night be not, and if sunlight be, the cause of day, the reason is not that sunlight always hitherto has been, and, on one indispensable condition, always will be followed by day, for so equally has hitherto been, and on the same condition will hereafter be, night. The real reason is, that sunlight not only always has been and will be, but also always must be followed by day; that unless the constitution of nature very materially change, wherever is sunlight day must be; whereas not only might day be, although night had never preceded, but unless night had preceded, day must have been from the beginning. In short, to constitute cause, invariability, however unconditional, will not suffice. Another quality must be added, and that quality I contend to be obligatoriness. A cause, I maintain, would not be a cause unless its effect not only do or will, but must necessarily follow it. In common with the great unphilosophic mass of mankind, I hold that between cause and effect there is a binding power which constrains the one to follow the other. If asked whence we suppose that power can have been derived, such of us, as conscious that we are 'no very great wits,' don't mind confessing that we 'believe in a God,' will not mind either suggesting that the power, wherever not exerted by an animated creature, may possibly be directly from God. One thing certain is, that inanimate matter cannot possibly possess or exercise any force or power whatever, so that, unless matter, although apparently dead, be really alive, attraction, cohesion, gravitation, and all its other so called forces, being incompatible with dead inertness, must needs be manifestations of some living, and possibly divine, power. Far from there being any difficulty in conceiving Omnipresent Deity to be exhibiting its might in every speck of universal space in every instant of never-ending time, it is, on the contrary, impossible to conceive otherwise. We cannot conceive one single minutest point in limitless extension to be for one moment exempt from the immediate control of a divine nature assumed to be

Diffused throughout infinity's expanse
And co-existent with eternity.

Here, indeed, we hasten to acknowledge with Hume that 'our line is too short to fathom the immense abyss' which we have now reached. But we need not, therefore, follow Hume to the lengths to which his insidious mock-modesty would fain entice us. We may concede to him that 'we have no idea of a Supreme Being but what we learn from reflection on our own faculties,' but we need not imitate him by perversely shutting our eyes to the evidences of an energy inherent in our own faculties, and thereby entitle him to insist on our joining him in denying that there is any evidence of energy in the Supreme Being. We need not, because constrained to admit that we know no more of the essence of divine, than we do of human, power, pretend that we cannot even conceive such a thing as divine power. Hume's affectation of profound ignorance on the subject must have occasioned unusual amusement in a certain quarter. The Devil can seldom have had a more hearty grin at his darling sin than when witnessing this peculiar exhibition of the pride that apes humility.

That Hume's ignorance was nothing but affectation is proved by his veering completely round immediately afterwards, and in his very next chapter, and almost in his very next page, pronouncing it to be 'universally allowed that matter in all its operations is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it.' Throughout the same chapter he argues in the same sense, and quite forgetting how obstinately he had just before contended that there are absolutely no such things as connection or power at all, he defies any one to 'define a cause without comprehending, as part of the definition, necessary connection with its effect.' So highly, indeed, does he now rate that connecting power, whose very existence he had previously so vehemently denied, that he professes himself unable to set any limit to its efficacy. Even for those who should undertake to deduce from it the impossibility of any liberty of human will, and consequently of any human responsibility, pleading that, inasmuch as with a continued chain of necessary causes, reaching from the first great cause of all to every separate volition of every single human creature, it must needs be the Creator of the world who is the ultimate author of all volitions, and consequently solely accountable for every crime which man commits, he affects, with exceedingly ill-sitting sanctimoniousness, to have no better answer than that such belief, being impious, must be absurd and cannot be true. It did not suit his purpose to point out that the volitions of Omnipotence itself, equally with human volitions, are necessary effects of causes—the causes in their case being the other attributes with which Omnipotence is conjoined—and that as it is nevertheless impossible for the volitions of Omnipotence to be otherwise than absolutely free and uncontrolled, so there is no reason why human volitions likewise should not, in spite of the same objection, be as thoroughly free as our own feelings assure us they are.

Hume's sudden conversion, so amazing at first sight, from flattest denial to positivest assertion of causal power, becomes intelligible when he is seen immediately afterwards using his newly adopted creed as a fulcrum whereon to rest his argumentative lever in his assault upon Miracles. About that celebrated piece of reasoning, startling as the avowal may sound, there is, to my mind, nothing more remarkable than its celebrity, for, on close inspection, it will be found to be entirely made up of (1) the demonstration of a truism, and (2) the inculcation of a confessedly misleading rule. Not far from its commencement will be found a definition which, if correct, would leave nothing to dispute about. A miracle, we are told, is 'a violation of the laws of nature,' of laws which a firm and unalterable experience has established. But if so, cadit quæstio. Of course, there can be no alteration of the unalterable. No need, of course, of further words to prove that a miracle thus defined is an impossibility.

Let us suppose, however, the word unalterable to have been used here by a slip of the pen instead of unaltered, and that Hume really meant by a miracle any alteration of what had previously appeared to be the constant course of nature. Even so, we shall have him contending that no amount, however great, of testimony however unimpeachable, ought to be accepted as adequate proof of such an alteration. Of what he urges in support of this position much may be at once dismissed as altogether irrelevant. That the most honest witness may be the dupe of optical or auricular illusion, or of a distorting or magnifying imagination; that there is in many minds a natural predisposition to believe in the marvellous, and that the love of astonishing often gives exaggerated expression to the exaggerations of the fancy; that self-interest and religious zeal often furnish additional motives for mendacity, and that testimony, even when sincere at first, is apt to become corrupted at every stage as it passes from hand to hand, or is committed to paper—all this, together with any further enumeration of circumstances calculated to invalidate testimony, is quite beside the real question. It merely proves what no one needs to have proved, the propriety, viz., of weighing evidence and balancing adverse probabilities; and even though it proved in addition that of all the so-styled miracles on record, there is not a single one the evidence for which is sufficient, it would still prove nothing to the purpose. For Hume is arguing against the credibility, not of any miracles in particular, but of all miracles in general, those included the witnesses for which are of indisputable intelligence and undisputed veracity. Be the quality of the testimony what it may, no quantity of it, according to him, can be sufficient. This is the essence of his thesis, the only part of it in which there is any novelty, and in behalf of this part all that he has to say may be resolved into a sophism, followed by a repetition of the same begging of the question, as is involved in his afore-cited definition of a miracle. In substance it runs as follows. All testimony is at best but a description of the results of sensible experience—of observations of the senses—but the most faithful description must needs be a less vivid presentation of truth than the reality described. A single original is better evidence than any number of copies. Your own personal experience is more trustworthy than any number of mere records of the experience of other people, and where the two conflict, the former always deserves preference. Now the personal experience of each one of us assures us that many sets of natural phenomena take place in perfectly invariable sequences, in sequences so invariable as to appear to be, and to be familiarly spoken of as, manifestations or operations of certain inflexible laws of nature. Within our experience there has never been a single deviation from any such law. Wherefore, though all the rest of mankind should unite in asserting that they have observed such a deviation, we ought not to believe them. Even though, for example—the example, however, being not Hume's, but my own—we were, on leaving home some morning, to hear on all sides that, while we were yet in bed, the sun was seen to rise in the west instead of the east, and though we found the statement repeated in the 'Times' and 'Daily News,' and presently afterwards saw it posted up at the Exchange as having been flashed by electric wire from New York and Kurrachee, we are not for a moment to doubt that these reiterated and mutually corroborative statements are utterly false. For, numerous and consistent as they may be, they are but copies of the experience of other people, while, although we may have to oppose to them only our own single experience, still that single experience is original, and therefore of more worth. The value, moreover, of any experience is, irrespective of originality, determined by the difference in number between the results of opposite kinds which it has discovered. The smaller number is deducted from the larger, and the balance represents the probability that the results which have most frequently occurred hitherto will continue to occur henceforward. The larger the deduction thus to be made, the smaller the probability, and vice versâ; and when the deduction is nil, or when there has hitherto been complete uniformity, the probability becomes virtual certainty. When two original experiences are opposed to each other, their respective values, ascertained in the same manner, are compared, and trust is reposed in one or the other accordingly. Now, according to these principles, difficult as it might be in the case supposed for any one to conceive what motive all the rest of the world could have for lying, it would be still more difficult to believe them to be speaking truth. For why do we ever believe anything that anyone says? Why but because we have learnt by experience that, when people have no apparent motive for lying, they commonly do speak the truth? But the same experience which has taught us this has taught us likewise that people do now and then lie without apparent motive. At best, therefore, there is never more than a probability that people are speaking the truth, while in this instance, the supposition that they might be speaking the truth would imply that there may be a truth against which there is proof amounting to certainty. For what they affirm is that something has happened the very reverse of what has invariably happened before in the same circumstances. Is it not infinitely more likely that people should be lying as they have often done before, than that the invariable course of nature should have undergone a variation? With evidence on the one side that has never yet deceived, with no evidence on the other save what has often proved deceptive, how can we hesitate which to accept? Even though the unanimity of testimony be such as might otherwise be deemed complete proof, it is here met by absolutely complete proof in the shape of a law of nature. The greater probability overwhelms the lesser. The stronger proof annihilates the weaker, leaving none of it behind, so that whoever still persists in believing that a law of nature has been violated, must be content to do so without one particle of proof. No quantity of testimony can furnish the smallest proof of a miracle unless the falsehood of the testimony would be a greater departure from antecedent uniformity—in other words, would be a greater miracle—than the miracle which it attests. Unfortunately it is but too notorious that there is not, and never has been, such a thing as uniform truthfulness of testimony to depart from.

Such, unless most unintentionally injured by compression, is Hume's famous argument against miracles, of which the author was sufficiently proud to boast openly that in it he had discovered what 'will be useful, as long as the world endures,' as 'an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion,' but which, as I nevertheless venture to repeat, is compounded in about equal moieties of transparent sophism and baseless assumption. For is it not the veriest juggle of words to insist on the necessary inferiority of copies to an original, without adverting to the indispensable proviso that the original with which the copies are compared should be the original from which the copies have been taken? May not a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' quite possibly be equal in force and vividness of expression to the original painting by Benjamin West bearing the same name? Might it not be wise to trust rather to an Airy, or a De la Rue, or a Lockyer's account of what he had observed during a solar eclipse than to your own immediate observations on the same occasion? Besides, this first branch of Hume's argument, if sound, would tell quite as much for, as against, miracles, rendering it equally incumbent on actual witnesses to believe, as on all but actual witnesses to disbelieve. If you are always to prefer your own original experience to mere descriptions given by other people of theirs, then should it happen to be yourself to whom the sun appeared in the west at an hour when, according to custom, he ought to have been in the east, you are not to allow the protestations of any number of persons who, happening at the time to have been looking the other way, saw the sun in his usual place, to persuade you that what you saw was a mock sun or an ignis fatuus. Rather than imagine that your own senses can have deceived you, you are to suppose that all about you are in a league to deceive you. For precisely the same reason for which you should reject even universal testimony in favour of a miracle which you have not witnessed, you are equally to reject universal testimony in opposition to a miracle the similitude of which you have witnessed.

Or is it possible for a question to be more distinctly begged than when, to the question whether a miracle has occurred, it is answered that a miracle is not a miracle unless there be uniform experience against it; that uniformly adverse experience is direct and full proof against anything; and that therefore there must always be full proof against miracles? What is here taken for granted to be full proof is the very thing requiring to be proved. If past uniformity really be a pledge for continued uniformity, of course there can be no departure from uniformity. If the whole question does not at once fall to the ground, it is because no question has ever really arisen. But what shadow of pretext is there for treating an hitherto unvaried course of events as necessarily invariable? From past experience we have deduced what we are pleased to call laws of nature, but it is morally impossible that we can seriously think, whatever we are in the habit of saying, that these laws are self-denying ordinances whereby nature's God has voluntarily abdicated part of His inalienable prerogative. The utmost efficacy we are warranted in ascribing to them is that of lines marking certain of the courses within which God's providence is pleased to move. But how can we pretend to know for how long a season such may continue to be the divine pleasure? How do we know that the present season may not be the first of an alternating series, and that it may not at any moment terminate, and be succeeded by one of an opposite character? What though we have some shadow of historical evidence that most physical phenomena have been going on in much the same order for some six thousand years, is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day? Might not as well some scientific member of an insect tribe of ephemera, whom ancestral tradition, confirmed by personal experience, had assured that an eight-day clock had already gone on for six days, pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other provisions the force of these isolated clauses may, in novel combinations of circumstances, be counteracted by some latent and hitherto unsuspected force? Or is it not, at all events, open to their divine promulgator to suspend their operation at his pleasure? May it not conceivably have been preordained that the globe of our earth, after revolving for a given number of ages, in one direction, shall then, like a meat-jack, or like an Ascidian's heart,[31] reverse its order of procedure, and commence a contrary series of revolutions? Or might not He who prescribed to the earth its rotatory movement, will that the rotation should for some hours cease, and that the sun should in consequence seem to stand still, as it is recorded to have done at the command of Joshua? Improbable as these suppositions may be, who that has not been taken into counsel by his Creator can presume to say that they may not be correct? The events which they involve are not inconceivable, and whatever is not utterly inconceivable may possibly occur, however numerous the chances against its occurrence. It is not then the fact that 'past experience,' however unvaried, affords full proof of the future existence of any event, or constitutes certainty against the future existence of the reverse of that event. Completest uniformity of experience cannot create a certainty by which any opposite probability would be completely annihilated. It only creates a probability which, however great, is still only a probability, and which would become a smaller probability by deduction from it of any opposite probability. But mere probability, however great, always includes some doubt as to its own correctness, some suspicion that its opposite may possibly be correct. How much soever, therefore, uniform experience may vouch for the inviolability of natural laws, it always remains possible for those laws to be violated, and, as miracles are nothing else but violations of natural laws, it always remains possible for miracles to happen. But since miracles are possible, testimony to their occurrence may, with equal possibility, be true, and no further refutation can, I submit, be needed for an argument which insists that all such testimony should be set aside without enquiry as self-evidently false.