21
“ART. XXII. — Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect. By Thomas Brown, M. D. F. R. S. Edinburgh, &c. Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Third edition. Edinburgh, 1818. 8vo, pp. 569,” The North American Review, vol. 12, no. 2 (April 1821), pp. 395–432; selections from pp. 395–6, 419–30.
[Samuel Gilman]
Samuel Foster Gilman (1791–1858) was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1811 from Harvard College. In 1819 he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was a Unitarian minister in the Second Independent Church. In the selection of his review of Thomas Brown’s Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect reprinted below, Gilman says he aims to defend Hume’s philosophical reputation from any “unfair stigma.” However, Gilman presents Hume as a philosopher who has plunged deep into the “mire” of scepticism. Gilman’s authorship of this review is attributed in William Cushing, Index to the North American Review (Cambridge, 1878), p. 131. On Gilman see Daniel Walker Howe, “Samuel Gilman,” ANB, vol. 9, pp. 63–4.
___________________________________
A WHOLE article of solid metaphysics is a phenomenon, that perhaps requires apology, as well as explanation. We will therefore briefly submit our reasons for its appearance.
The philosophy of the late lamented Dr. Brown is scarcely known in this country. It was presumed that considerable interest would attach among us to the speculations of the successor of Dugald Stewart, whose own work on the Mind has passed, we believe, through as many editions in the United States as in Great Britain, and who is well known, on becoming emeritus, to have warmly recommended Dr. Brown to the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh. But farther, there is a vague belief among those who are but partially acquainted with the nature of the late professor’s speculations, that they coincided too nearly with the dangerous parts of the philosophy of David Hume. A faithful analysis of the work before us will correct this error, and redeem Dr. Brown’s reputation. Still further, an unjust and indiscriminate censure has overwhelmed the whole system of Hume itself with relation to the doctrine of Cause and Effect. When Professor Leslie, in consequence of having expressed his approbation of certain portions of that system, encountered from the ministers of Edinburgh strong opposition to his pretensions as candidate for a chair in the university, the nucleus of the present volume was published in a pamphlet form, and by distinguishing what was sound from what was exceptionable in the opinion of Hume, contributed to soften the opposition made to the too honest candidate. The work, in its present very much enlarged state, confirms the points maintained in the pamphlet, and though we profess no love, and but qualified respect for Hume in his metaphysical capacity, we are willing to assist in removing every unfair stigma from every literary reputation.
…
The Fourth and last Part is employed in an examination of Mr. Hume’s Theory of our Belief of the Relation of Cause and Effect. If our readers will lend their attention to a few succeeding statements, they will perhaps find that clear ideas of Mr. Hume’s Philosophy have not hitherto prevailed, and that Dr. Brown’s system of Cause and Effect, although corresponding with a portion of Mr. Hume’s, yet departs as widely as possible from it on every exceptionable point. We shall take considerable pains to set these assertions in a convincing light; — both because we regret to have learned, that an opinion was not long since entertained by most illustrious authority on the other side of the water, that Dr. Brown had been endeavouring to set up a theory of causation, which was ill-understood by himself, and which differed not materially from the theory of Hume, — and because, as our author is now laid where he cannot reply to one surmise against the soundness and correctness of his writings, we would try, with at least as fond a reverence as strangers may be supposed capable of, to efface every stain that may unjustly attach to his literary reputation.
Mr. Hume commenced the statement of his views on this subject by reviving some hints that former writers had suggested as to the doctrine of a conjunction, rather than a connexion of the events that are constantly succeeding one another in the world of nature around us. In this simple doctrine, how much alarm soever a mistatement [sic] or a misapprehension of it may have once excited, there was not the semblance of a dangerous tendency. It still left the existence of every object and every event in nature as real and as certain as they were before. In resolving those incessant changes, that are every where happening, into a long train of antecedents and consequents, it did not deny, but rather confirmed the necessity of an antecedent for every consequent, and thus furnished a strong argument for the existence of some great First Cause — some necessary antecedent of all the effects in the universe. It still left to this great invisible Being the ability to will into existence every substance that is, and the wisdom of arranging that eternal continuity of successive phenomena, which is all the time developing such astonishing results of order, harmony, beauty, and happiness. There was nothing truly sceptical about this doctrine, if by sceptical we mean any quality of an opinion, which fairly leads to an irreligious conclusion. The question related purely to a physical matter of fact, which, whatsoever way decided, leaves all the great truths of natural and revealed religion as sacredly guarded as they were before. As for philosophy, she certainly had a right to demand the evidence for that supposed invisible link, which connects each change with the substance that produces it. On the absence of that evidence, Hume, trusting to the evidence of the senses which God had given him, and perceiving by those senses nothing more than a succession of changes, advances his leading doctrine, that we can have no other idea of causation, than a bare precession of one event to another, without involving any thing that intervenes between the antecedent and consequent. Dr. Brown, perceiving the strong ground of nature and the senses on which Hume stood, embraces the doctrine, states and defends it at much length in the First Part of this treatise, insists that every new link which is discovered between the two parts of a sequence, such for instance as an inflammable gas between the heat of yon candle and the combustion of this pen, becomes only a new unlinked antecedent to the visible effect; — and not only this, but in his Second Part, assigns several satisfactory reasons why the world should have been so long deceived in imagining, and giving a name to a nonentity.
The next doctrine of Hume was equally free from the character of scepticism. It was, that the human mind has no capacity of predicting, previously to experience, the particular consequents that will result from any given antecedent, or in other words, that we are unable of ourselves to divine any of the powers of nature. It required but little reflection to adopt this opinion, which, to our minds, is perfectly independent of the former doctrine, and might be true, whatever theory of causation be so. Accordingly, Dr. Brown, as we have seen, in his Third Part, maintains that experience alone is the ground of those predictions which we are every day forming of the future effects of objects now existing around us. Thus far our two philosophers go along together. But from this point they separate; they diverge widely and irrecoverably. Having hitherto agreed with each other; when they come to ask, on what principle of the human mind we predict, after experience, the consequences of causes, Dr. Brown answers the question — by intuitive and irresistible belief. On thrusting this pen into the candle’s blaze, we believe it will burn; but we arrive at this belief, not from any process of reasoning, but because, having before seen the same effect proceed from the same cause, we cannot help believing it. This simple and clear statement of an ultimate fact, so consonant to the most approved rules of the Baconian philosophy, terminates Dr. Brown’s system. And whether that system be right or wrong, we do earnestly crave leave to insist, that if ever there was one, which deserved the appellations of intelligible, compact, consistent, simple, this is the one. Even before Dr. Brown wrote, we were confessedly all in the dark about causation. He does not pretend to reveal the mystery of it to us, but only to check our impatient and unavailing struggles after a figment of our own fancy, to exhibit the limits of the human mind on this subject, and to confine our reasoning and imagination entirely to the visible side of the curtain of our existence, on which are wrought no other figures, nay, out of which peeps not a thread, but those of experience. If the author himself was so unfortunate as not to understand his own system, he certainly has had the signally good success of causing some readers; humble, and without authority, we allow, but as conscientiously attentive to the train of his reasonings as their capacities would admit of; to comprehend it to their most entire satisfaction. Nor, until we find some hint in his writings, or learn of some declaration that passed his mouth, revealing a consciousness of the unintelligibility of his speculations, can we possibly conceive or believe that he did not understand them himself.
Let us now turn to Mr. Hume, and see if he has really gained in our author an implicit and unqualified follower.
Instead of allowing, or perhaps perceiving the force and authority of that great principle of intuitive belief which terminates Dr. Brown’s speculations, he lays a world of stress on the following maxim, which in hands as dexterous as his own, may lead into the most licentious, extravagant, and dangerous scepticism.
‘In all reasonings from experience, there is a step taken by the mind, which is not supported by any argument or process of the understanding.’
At the enunciation of this portentous proposition, the mind involuntarily stands aghast. All the realities and well grounded expectations of life seem to be sinking, like fragments of floating ice, under our feet. The truth of the proposition itself you cannot deny; that is, if you allow that the business of life is carried on by ‘reasonings from experience.’ It is but too evident that from no quarter on earth have we gotten the information that the future will resemble the past, which is the assumed step that Hume refers to. Hence one feels that one has no right to introduce that assumption into any reasoning which is to guide his future operations. The consequence is, he may proceed to beat his head against a rock, with all the calmness in the world, and still be a very reasonable man; and why? Why, he has no right to assume that the future will resemble the past! and therefore the rock may in all possibility meet his head with the softness of a pillow of down. A wanton assassin may be justified in rushing out of his den, and stabbing a whole virtuous population one by one through the body; because, if he supposes that his dagger will sever their souls from their mortal tenements, he most illogically and unrighteously assumes a step in his reasoning, for which he has no authority, viz: that the future will resemble the past. Not to multiply examples of this kind, which must press on the imaginations of our readers as numerously as on our own, we will yet instance only religion, which, by the magical waving of this dialectic wand, is made to evaporate into air, along with all other solid realities. For why should you rely on any one attribute of Jehovah; why should you trust in his mercy, hope for his bounty, pray for his blessing, nay, expect his existence or your own one moment longer, since in so doing you assume that step for which you have no imaginable authority, which is, that the future will resemble the past?
This is the slough to which Hume would conduct us. It seems a cruel fatality, that the man who has taken off the bandage from our eyes, by which we might have been betrayed into the midst of this miry scepticism, and who has shown us the rock on which we may safely and surely rest our foot far from this side of the horrible results of the above maxim of Mr. Hume, should have been suspected of coinciding in the main with that lubricous philosopher. Brown asserts that we expect an effect to follow any given cause, or the future to resemble the past, only in consequence of an irresistible and intuitive belief, which God has wrought into our very constitutions, and which we can no more avoid than we can avoid perceiving a visible object when we open our eyes. Hence, the mind of itself assumes no step in the above-mentioned reasonings, if reasonings there be; it is God himself who assumed it, when he so created us, that there should be a perfect correspondence between our own minds and the onward progress of rolling events around us. From this view of the subject, not one dangerous or shocking consequence flows. It utterly excludes the idea of an arbitrary or unappointed arrangement of things, since we find, in millions of instances, events to take place according to our expectations, and in the few instances where they do not, it is in con-sequence of the error of our expectations, arising from a limited experience. So far, moreover, from its involving scepticism, it is but too plain that it justifies and encourages a universal and confident belief, as directly opposite to scepticism as pole to pole. And as to exciting any distrust towards the Deity, or any irreligious affections whatever, we have already learned in the beautiful passage which closes the abstract of the Third Part of this book, that in impressing on our minds this unavoidable, this instinctive belief, the Deity has manifested for us a signal tenderness, which must touch every susceptible heart. When we recollect, that, were it not for this truly vital principle in our mental constitution, we must every moment be liable to be crushed by the masses and powers that are resistlessly moving by, or are at work all around us; that we must be constantly exposed to being caught in the wheels of that mighty machinery, whose operations we can now intuitively predict; or that we must sit still and starve amidst this world of plenty and joy into which we are born; we may literally say of our Creator with Moses, as an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, so the Lord hath condescended to take care of his creature man.
Yet Mr. Hume, writhing beneath the tortures of his own absurd conclusions, sets about with all his metaphysical might to extricate himself from them, although in so doing, he only wanders still further from Dr. Brown, and plunges still deeper into the mire.
Instead of resorting, at once, with our author, to an ultimate principle of our mental constitution, an intuitive belief, which would have untied the knot that puzzled him, he makes the affair of the gratuitous step in our reasonings from experience, a very intricate process, which he would explain to the following effect, as summed up by our author.
‘When two objects have been frequently observed in succession, the mind passes readily from the idea of one to the idea of the other: from this tendency to transition, and from the greater vividness of the idea thus more readily suggested, there arises a belief of the relation of cause and effect between them; the transition in the mind itself, being the impression, from which the idea of the necessary connexion of the objects, as cause and effect, is derived.’ p. 391.
We can afford but some very short commentaries on this passage, which will, however, be sufficient to demonstrate its astonishing absurdity, and will still further evince that Hume and Dr. Brown do not go hand in hand so affectionately together.
1. Hume begins, ‘when two objects have been frequently observed in succession,’ &c. He here implies, that we do not expect that one thing is the cause of another, or that the antecedent will again produce the consequent, or in other words, that the future will resemble the past, until after repeated observations of the sequence. But our belief arises on a single observation, according to Dr. Brown, who instances a vast number of cases in which there can be no doubt, such as the stinging of a bee for the first time, or the smell of a new flower, which we immediately believe will in all future time produce the same effects. Our author reconciles to his principle those cases which seem to contradict it; but we must not stop to show how. The difference between the two authors is our principle object here.
2. ‘The mind,’ continues Mr. Hume, ‘passes readily from the idea of the one to the idea of the other.’ There is something so hypothetical, so unphilosophical, in this assumption, that we need not contrast it with our author’s simple open theory of immediate and intuitive belief. Surely there is some difference between stating an ultimate intellectual operation, as Brown has done, without attempting to explain it, and gratuitously representing the mind as skipping backward and forward from idea to idea, as a bird does from twig to twig.
3. One would have thought the preceding assertion of Mr. Hume quite shadowy enough; but next comes a statement, which is more evanescent and impalpable than even the shadow of a shade. ‘From this tendency to transition, and from the greater vividness of the idea thus more readily suggested, there arises a belief of the relation of cause and effect between them.’ Whoever can grasp the meaning of this tendency, and then combine it, some how or other, with the vividness of an idea, so that the union of the two together shall make up the operation of belief, must be blessed with a truly metaphysical genius. Even on the supposition that the statement is clear and intelligible, our author demonstrates its falsity by a long course of arguments, combatting particularly the error that the vividness of an idea is essential even to the strongest belief. This is at least a third minor difference.
4. ‘The transition in the mind itself, being the impression, from which the idea of the necessary connexion of the objects, as cause and effect, is derived.’ A transition in the mind, an impression on the mind! — a high absurdity. Yet this is the very keystone of the theory which would explain our expectations of the future, or our belief in causation, on any other principle than intuitive belief.
We leave this passage now to the reflections and the judgment of our readers, and will not attempt to abstract more copiously the hundred pages, in which our author exposes its fallacies, its assumptions, its absurd consequences on the one hand, its inconclusiveness on the other, and the various theories and considerations brought to defend it. The whole topic is somewhat of an excrescence on the simple exposition of the theory before us. The author himself indeed somewhere apologises for its introduction, by observing that Mr. Hume’s opinions on the subject have had so powerful an influence on this abstruse but very important part of physical science, that it would be injustice to his merits, to consider them only with incidental notice, in a work that is chiefly reflective of the lights which he has given. We will therefore fill up the space allowed us, by extracting a masterly sketch of Mr. Hume’s character, as a metaphysical writer. Every reader, we presume, will thank us for the exchange.
‘That he was an acute thinker, on those subjects to which the vague name of Metaphysics is commonly given, there was, probably, no one, even of his least candid antagonists, who would have ventured to deny. That he was also an exact and perspicuous metaphysical writer, has been generally admitted, but it has been admitted, chiefly as a consequence of the former praise, or from the remembrance of powers of style, which, in many other respects, he unquestionably possessed. We think of him, perhaps, as an historian, while we are praising him as a metaphysician; or in praising him as a metaphysician, we think of qualities, necessary indeed for the detection of error, but different from those which the development of the system of truths of an abstruse and complicated science peculiarly requires.
‘In the philosophy of mind, where the objects are all dim and fleeting, it is the more necessary to remedy, as much as possible, by regular progressive inquiry, and the methodical arrangement, and precision of terms, the uncertainty that might otherwise flow from the shadowy nature of the inquiry itself. The speculations of Mr. Hume, however, as I conceive, are far from being marked with this sort of accuracy. The truths, which his acuteness is quick to find and to present to us, rather flit before our eyes in gleamy coruscation, than fling on the truths which follow them that harmonizing lustre, which makes each in progressive illumination more radiant by the brightness that preceded it, and more fit therefore to reflect new radiance on the brightness which is to follow. The genius of his metaphysical style, — discursive and rapid, and sometimes in consequence of that very rapidity of transition, slow in its general results, from the necessity of recurring to points of inquiry that have been negligently abandoned, — is not of the kind that seems best fitted for close and continuous investigation: and though, in the separate views which he gives us of a subject, we are often struck with the singular acuteness of his discernment, and as frequently charmed with an ease of language, which, without the levity of conversation, has many of its playful graces, still, when we consider him as the expositor of a theory, we are not less frequently sensible of a want of rigid order and precision, for which subtlety of thought and occasional graces of the happiest diction are not adequate to atone.
‘It is when we wish to unfold a system of truths, that we are most careful to exhibit them progressively, in luminous order: for, in the exposure of false opinions, the error, whatever it may be, which we wish to render manifest, may often be exhibited as successfully, by varied views of it in its different aspects, as by the closest analytical investigation. The want of strict, continuous method in some of the theoretical parts of Mr. Hume’s metaphysical essays, — in which we discover more easily what he wishes us not to believe, than what he wishes us positively to believe, or in which, at least, the limits of the doubtful and the true are not very precisely defined to our conception, — may thus, perhaps, in part be traced to the habits of refined scepticism, in which it seems to have been the early and lasting passion of Mr. Hume’s mind to indulge. It was more in the detection of fallacies in the common systems of belief, than in the discovery of truths, which might be added to them, that he loved to exercise his metaphysical ingenuity; or, rather, the detection of fallacies was that species of discovery of truth, in which he chiefly delighted. There is, indeed, a calm, yet ever wakeful scepticism of an inquisitive mind, which has nothing in it that is unfavourable, either to closeness of reasoning in the discovery of truth, or to exactness of theoretical arrangement, in the communication of it to others. Such a spirit is even so essential to every sort of intellectual inquiry, that the absence of it in any one may be considered as a sufficient proof, that he has not the genius of a metaphysician: for the science of metaphysics, as it regards the mind, is, in its most important respects, a science of analysis; and we carry on our analysis, only when we suspect that what is regarded by others as an ultimate principle, admits of still finer evolution into principles still more elementary. It is not, therefore, by such doubts as have only further inquiry in view, that the intellectual character is in any danger of being vitiated: but there is a very great difference between the scepticism which examines every principle, only to be sure that inquiry has not terminated too soon, and that which examines them, only to discover and proclaim whatever apparent inconsistencies may be found in them. Astonishment, indeed, is thus produced; and it must be confessed, that there is a sort of triumphant delight in the production of astonishment, which it is not easy to resist, especially at that early period of life,* when the love of fame is little more than the love of instant wonder and admiration. But he who indulges in the pleasure, and seeks, with a sportful vanity of acuteness, to dazzle and perplex, rather than enlighten, will find, that though he may have improved his quickness of discernment, by exercises of nice and unprofitable subtlety, he has improved it at the expense of those powers of patient investigation, which give to dialectic subtlety its chief value.
‘The perpetual consideration of the insufficiency of all inquiry, as deduced from inconsistencies which may seem to be involved in some of our principles of belief, is more encouraging to indolence than to perseverance. By representing to us error, as the necessary termination of every speculative pursuit, it seems, at every moment, to warn us not to proceed so far; and tends, therefore, to seduce the faculties into a luxurious sloth-fulness of occupation, which prefers a rapid succession of brilliant paradoxes, to truths of more extensive and lasting utility, but of more laborious search.
‘To shew that it is not from any logical inference, or direct induction, we have derived many of those opinions which, by the very constitution of our nature, it is impossible for us not to hold, and which have been formed without any thought of their origin, requires indeed superior perspicuity, but does not require any process of long continued reasoning. The very habit of ratiocination is thus apt to yield to a love of briefer exercises of discursive subtlety; and this tendency, when the scepticism relates to moral and religious subjects, is still increased by the popular odium attached to infidelity, in those great articles of general belief, — an odium, which may naturally be supposed to induce the necessity, in many cases, of exhibiting subjects only by glimpses, and of hinting, rather than fully developing and enforcing a proof.
‘A mind that has long been habituated to this rapid and lively species of remark, and that has learned to consider all inquiries as of doubtful evidence, and their results therefore as all equally or nearly equally satisfactory or unsatisfactory, does not readily submit to the regularity of slow disquisition. It may exhibit excellencies, for which we may be immediately led to term it, with the justest commendation, acute or subtle, or ingenious: but it will not be in many cases that there will be reason to ascribe to it that peculiar quality of intellect, which sees, through a long train of thought, a distant conclusion, and separating at every stage the essential from the accessory circumstances, and gathering and combining; analogies as it proceeds, arrives at length at a system of harmonious truth. This comprehensive energy is a quality to which acuteness is necessary, but which is not itself necessarily implied in acuteness; or rather it is a combination of qualities, for which we have not yet an exact name, but which forms a peculiar character of genius, and is, in truth, the very guiding spirit of all philosophic investigation.
‘That a long indulgence in the ingenuities of scepticism, though it may improve mere dialectic acuteness, has a tendency to deaden, if I may so term it, the intellectual perception of the objects on which it is wisdom to rest, and, by flinging the same sort of doubtful light over truth and error, to make error often appear as worthy of assent as truth, — at least if the error happen to be in any doctrine of the sceptic himself, — is, I think, what our knowledge of some of the strongest principles of the mind might naturally lead us to expect. That the evil, of which I speak, is truly to be found in the metaphysical speculations of Mr. Hume, I may be wrong, indeed, in supposing; but, if any part of his abstract writings be marked with it, there is none, I conceive, in which it is so conspicuous, as in those which relate to the subject that has been now under review. While he appears only as the combatant of error, in exposing the inadequacy of perception or mere reasoning to afford us directly any notion of the necessary connexion of events, it is impossible not to feel the force of the negative arguments which he urges, and equally impossible not to admire the acuteness and vigor of intellect which these display. But when, after these negative arguments, he presents to us opinions on the subject, which he wishes us to receive as positive truth, a very slight consideration is all that seems necessary to show, how strong the self-illusive influence must have been, that could make these opinions, unwarranted as they are by the evidence of observation or consciousness, appear to his own mind worthy of the credit which he expects to be given to them. It is fortunate for his intellectual character, that it is not as a dogmatist only, he has given us opportunities of knowing him. The minor theories involved in his doctrine of the origin of the notion of power, would certainly give a very unfavourable impression of his talents as a metaphysical inquirer; if his reputation as a metaphysician were to be founded wholly on this or other positive doctrines maintained by him, and not on the acuteness with which, in many brilliant exercises of sceptical subtlety, he has exhibited what he wishes to be considered as errors in the systems of popular and scientific faith.’ p. 338.
Before dismissing our author, we shall venture to offer one or two strictures on the leading doctrine and definition in his book.
We apprehend that both himself and Mr. Hume have overlooked an essential element which enters into our idea of a cause, and which, if introduced into their definition, would at least have made it more easily comprehended and received. A cause, Dr. Brown defines to be, that which immediately precedes any chance, &c. This definition involves only immediate succession, or proximity in time. Is not contiguity in place equally a part of our notion of causation? Must not the antecedent in our idea be locally present with the consequent? It is an axiom, which, at its very first announcement, every body, — child — peasant — philosopher — believes and acknowledges, that no power can act where it is not present. It is true we have an idea of remote causes, as well as proximate causes. But every remote cause is always supposed to act upon something immediately near, and then that something to act upon another as immediately near it, and so on, till we arrive in idea to the proximate cause, which, to produce the last effect, is believed to be near it, even to immediate contiguity. We think that the omission of this idea has led Dr. Brown as well as Mr, Hume into considerable embarrassment, when they came to apply their principle to the innumerable coexisting sequences of phenomena, which at every moment are taking place throughout nature. They have both left that point in an unsatisfactory state, Mr. Hume to Dr. Brown, and Dr. Brown to us. If nothing more than immediate precession in time is admitted into our idea of causation, then, why is not the acorn, which is planted at the same time with the cherry-stone, regarded as the cause of the fruit-tree, as much as it is of the oak? Admit into your definition the necessary circumstance of immediate contiguity in place, as well as immediate precession in time, and you escape from this objection.
*‘We are told by Mr. Hume, that the Treatise on Human Nature was projected by him before he had left college.’