There been some thing from eternity to cause what now is. is in, and belongs to, its being from another too' (Ibid. sec. 4.). From this is deduced the supreme power and perfect knowledge of the eternal being upon the principle that whatever is in the effect must also be in the cause -a principle, however, which has to be subjected to must have awkward limitations in order that, while proving enough, it may not prove too much. It might seem that, according to it, since the real being, from which as effect the eternal being as cause is demonstrated, is both material and cogitative' or 'made up of body and spirit,' matter as well as thought must belong to the eternal being too. That thought must belong to him, Locke is quite clear. It is as impossible, he holds, that thought should be derived from matter, or from matter and motion together, as that something should be derived from nothing. 'If we will suppose nothing first or eternal, matter can never begin to be: if we suppose bare matter without motion eternal, motion can never begin to be: if we suppose only matter and motion first or eternal, thought can never begin to be' (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 10). The objection which is sure to occur, that it must be equally impossible for matter to be derived from thought, he can scarcely be said to face. He takes refuge in the supreme power of the eternal being, as that which is able to create matter out of nothing. He does not anticipate the rejoinder to which he thus lays himself open, that this power in the eternal being to produce one effect not homogeneous with itself, viz. matter, may extend to another effect, viz. thought, and that thus the argument from thought in the effect to thought in the cause becomes invalid, and nothing but blind power, we know not what, remains as the attribute of the eternal being. Nor does he remember, when he meets the objection drawn from the inconceivability of matter being made out of nothing by saying that what is inconceivable is not therefore impossible (ibid. sec. 19), that it is simply the inconceivability of a sequence of something upon nothing that has given him his 'evident demonstration' of an eternal being. How must be 148. The value of the first step in Locke's argument-the inference, namely, from there being something now to there understood having been something from eternity-must be differently estimated according to the meaning attached to 'something' and from eternity.' If the existence of something means the occurrence of an event, of this undoubtedly it can always if this argument is to be valid: be said that it follows another event, nor to this sequence can any limit be supposed, for a first event would not be an event at all. It would be a contingency contingent upon nothing. Thus understood, the argument from a something now to a something from eternity is merely a statement of the infinity of time according to that notion of infinity, as a 'progressus ad indefinitum,' which we have already seen to be Locke's.' It is the exact reverse of an argument to a creation or a first cause. If we try to change its character by a supplementary consideration that infinity in the series. of events is inconceivable, the rejoinder will be that a first event is not for that reason any less of a contradiction, and that the infinity which Locke speaks of only professes to be a negative idea, representing the impossibility of conceiving a first event (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 13, &c.). In truth, however, when Locke speaks of 'something from eternity' he does not mean-what would clearly be no God at all-a series of events to which, because of events, and therefore in time, no limit can be supposed; but a being which is neither event nor series of events, to which there is no before or after. The inference to such a being is not of a kind with the transition from one event to another habitually associated with it; and if this be the true account of reasoning from effect to cause, no such reasoning can yield the result which Locke requires. As we have seen, however, this is not his account of it, however legitimately it may follow from his general doctrine. 149. The inference of cause with him is the inference and how from a change to something having power to produce it.3 'cause." The value of this definition lies not in the notion of efficient power, but in that of an order of nature, which it involves. If instead of something having power to produce it' we read 'something that accounts for the change,' it expresses the inference on which all science rests, but which is as far as possible from being merely a transition from one event to another that usually precedes it. An event, interpreted as a change of something that remains constant, is no longer a mere event. It is no longer merely in time, a present which next moment becomes a past. It takes its character from relation to the thing or system of things of which it is an altered appearance, but which in itself is always the same. 1 See above, paragraph 138. See above, paragraph 68. Cf. I. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1. Only in virtue of such a relation does it require to be accounted for, to be referred to a 'cause,' which is in truth the conception that holds together or reconciles the endless flux of events with eternal unity. The cause of a 'phenomenon,' even according to the authoritative exponent of the Logic which believes itself to follow Hume, is the 'sum total of its conditions.' In its fulness, that is, it is simply that system of things, conceived explicitly, of which there must already have been an implicit conception in order that the event might be regarded as a change and thus start the search for a cause. An event in time, apart from reference to something not in time, could suggest no enquiry into the sum of its conditions. Upon occurrence of a certain feeling there might indeed be spontaneous recollection of a feeling usually precedent, spontaneous expectation of another usually sequent. But such association of feelings can never explain that conception of cause in virtue of which, when accounting for a phenomenon, we set aside the event which in our actual experience has usually preceded it, for one which we only find to precede it in the single case of a crucial experiment. That we do so shows that it is not because of antecedence in time, however apparently uniform, that an educated man reckons a certain event to be the cause of another, but that, because of its sole sufficiency under the sum of known conditions to account for the given event, he decides it to be its uniform antecedent, however much ordinary appearances may tell to the contrary. Thus, though he may still strangely define cause as a uniformly antecedent event (in spite of its being a definition that would prevent him from speaking of gravity as the cause of the fall of a stone), it is clear that by such event he means one determined by a complex of conditions in an unchanging universe. These conditions, again, he may speak of as contingencies, i.e. as events contingent upon other events in endless series, but he must add contingent in accordance with the uniformity of nature'-in other words, he must determine the contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation be a 'progressus ad indefinitum '-if he is to allow a possibility of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events, feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no law of causation' and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the argumentum a contingentiâ mundi' rightly understood--the inference' from nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing appearances-is valid because the conception of nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer must be the question, What meaning has real existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this conception ? which is to prove an eternal be itself 150. The value, then, of Locke's demonstration of the The world existence of God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal being from which the real existence that we know has all which is in and belongs to it,' depends God must on our converting it into the argumentum a contingentiâ eternal. mundi,' stated as above. In other words, it depends on our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the real that we have found in him,' but which is inconsistent with his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction of it to 'particular existence,' as well as with his ordinary view that 'infinite' and 'eternal' can represent only a progressus ad indefinitum.' If by 'real existence corresponding to an idea' is meant its presentation in a particular 'here and now,' an attempt to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another. If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination of our ideas by an order of nature-if it means ideas 'in ordine ad universum' (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from in ordine ad nos '-then the argument from a present to an eternal real existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is already real, and has all that is in and belongs to it,' only in virtue of the relation to the eternal. whose ex 151. This, it may be said, is to vindicate Locke's 'proof' But will only by making it Pantheistic. It gives us an eternity of the God, nature, but not God. Our present concern, however, is not istence is with the distinction between Pantheism and true Theism, so proven, See above, paragraphs 49 and 91. ing being? Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter. but with the exposition of Locke's doctrine according to the only development by which it can be made to show the real existence of an eternal being at all. It is only by making the most of certain Cartesian elements that appear in his doctrine, irreconcileable with its general purport, that we can find fair room in it for such a being, even as the system of nature. Any attempt to exhibit (in Hegelian phrase) 'Spirit as the truth of nature,' would be to go wholly beyond our record; yet without this the 'ens realissimum' cannot be the God whose existence Locke believes himself to prove—a thinking being from whom matter and motion are derived, but in whom they are not. It is true that, according to the context, it is the real existence of the self from which that of the eternal being is proved. This is because, in the Fourth Book, where the 'proof' occurs, following the new train of enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas are types of reality, and is writing as if my own real existence' were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however, makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated expressly as both material and cogitative:' nor, since according to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the thinking thing' takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too, like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong. 152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (e.g. death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system-a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it |