Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Elements of the philosophy of the human mind / by Dugald Stewart. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
90/608 (page 74)
![figure, and to conceive white, blue, and yellow, as fomething fpread over the furfaces of bodies. In the fame way, we are led to affociate with inanimate mat- ter, the ideas of power, force, energy, and caufation ; which are all attributes of mind, and can exift in a mind only. The bias of our nature is ftrengthened by another aifociation. Our language, with refpeft to caufe and effea, is borrowed by analogy from material objefts. Some of thefe we fee fcattered about us, without any connexion between them fo that one of them may 'be removed from its place, without difturbing the reft. We can, however, by means of fome material vincu- lum, connea two or more objeas together ; fo that whenever the one is moved, the others fhall follow. In like manner, we fee fome events, which occafionally follow one another, and which are occafionally dif- joined : we fee others, where the fucceflion is conftant and invariable. The former we conceive to be ana- logous to objeas which are loofe, and unconneaed with each other, and whofe contiguity in place, is ow- ing merely to accidental pofition; the others to ob- jeas which are tied together by a material vinculum. Hence we transfer to fuch events, the fame language which we apply to conneaed objeas. We fpeak of a connexion between two events, and of a chain of caufes and effeas *. That this language is merely analogical, and that we know nothing of phyfical events, but the laws which regulate their fucceflion, muft, I think, appear * See Note [!)]• very](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28041598_0090.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
