'Raw'things,or unanalysed concrete events,do happen at random,that is,without uniform antecedents.Nothing is easier than to think of things without thinking of their causes.The primitive mind,and even the cultivated mind,may simply watch the series of events without trying to find any connection or indulging in any reasoning.But this is quite different from thinking of things as positively uncaused.A phenomenon suddenly intrudes without warning.I may accept it without asking whence it comes,or why.But there is no really positive meaning in the statement that it is caused by 'nothing.'It does not imply a contradiction,such as occurs when I put together the words crooked and straight,round and square;but it represents no intelligible meaning.It corresponds to a simple absence of thought.When I speak of the uniformity of Nature,I mean simply to indicate a condition of thinking about Nature at all.I may cease to reason or to think;but if I think,I must think coherently,and assume what has been called the 'Universal Postulate.'(92)The phrase seems to me to be inadequate;and at any rate it is a postulate with this peculiarity,that we cannot make any other.To deny it is to allow contradictory statements on the most intimate tissue of our reasoning.It is as impossible to do without it as to do without the principle of contradiction in pure logic.It helps us to no positive statement;but it is a warning that our statements must be coherent.Hence,we must allow the mind to have this modest capacity for working up its experience.If it starts from so unprejudiced a point of view as to admit contradictions,or allow of inconsistent statements about things,it will never be able to get anywhere,and when Mill has reduced all our knowledge to the relations between ideas in the mind,it is really quite inconsistent to allow the mind no power of putting ideas together.Without such a power it is difficult to say what is even meant by the perception of 'coexistences'and 'sequences.'The progress of knowledge,then,must be understood as corresponding to the process by which the chaos of impressions and ideas is gradually reduced to cosmos;and as starting from a position in which no cause has been yet discovered for great masses of facts,not from a position in which 'no cause'is an equally probable alternative with 'some cause.'To reason at all about facts is to arrange them in order of causation,and to suppose them as having certain time-and space-relations.To get behind that primitive germ of reasoning is really to make logic impossible from the start.Mill's dread of a priori intuitions and necessary results thus led him into perfectly gratuitous difficulties.Granting the 'necessity'of arithmetic or geometry,it is still a hypothetical necessity.It can never take us beyond experience.Such theorems cannot tell us of the existence of a single thing or of its nature.They can only say that if we see things in space they will have certain relations which are deducible from the special confirmation.
Without that power the universe would be undecipherable,but with it our knowledge still has throughout a completely empirical base.Not a single statement of fact can be made which is not derived from,and justified by,experience;nor can our experience ever get beyond saying that any given section of the whole is developed out of,and develops into,preceding and succeeding sections.
VIII.THE FOUR METHODS
