of relation, whereby the world is no infinite sum of isolated existences, and, once more, the lights in which it is seen, as involving energy of being. Why should we not see in this ultimate core of being, to which reference has just been made, that which our philosophic thought can connect with the immanent energy of the Absolute in a world like ours? Retaining, in the theistic sense, a true ultimate Ground or Cause, our thought has not been able to rest in the view of James Hinton, who, in the earliest and metaphysical part of his 'Philosophy and Religion,' disposes of the category of causality as "nothing real," but only "a form of thought,” in fact, an “absolute nonentity," so putting the copestone on Kantian scepticism. There is for it no mistaking the imperial sway of the idea of causation, which, under the influence of modern science, has more than ever become inwrought in our experience as, in fact, an axiom of the reason, to which, we cannot doubt, justice if not more than its due-has been done.

It has become more manifest that, if we would not treat our own thought-activity, our own consciousness, and the active subjects we ourselves are, as so many illusions, we must recognise causality as an objective law of the world. No logical demonstration of God was possible to the Causal Argument, but it is now more freely recognised what helpful ends it served in bringing into bold relief such matters as the insufficiency of the materialistic ex

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planation, the dependence of the world, and the transcendence of the Deity. The law that dependent being demands Being, which shall be absolute, as its support and its correlate, is plainly seen to be an inexorable one in human thought, and no possibility here obtains of confounding the Primal Cause with nature itself. Kant ought to have seen that the Cosmological Argument is only an inference to the existence of a necessary Being, and he should not have piled the Ontological Argument in its a priori aspect upon the Cosmological proof in the way he has done. It is another and very different procedure, if the Cosmological Argument should turn, from the mere existence of its necessary Being, to the Ontological Argument, that this latter may make some determination of the nature of this Being as Infinite in its attributes, should such a Being exist. In the endless regress of the usual form of the argument, we reach an end of efficient forces in the physical realm, and therewith causation, as sharply distinguished from spontaneity, ceases, leaving the attempt-as ought to have been seen-to prove an Absolute Cause, abortive. But, since matter could not yield us a true Infinite, theistic philosophy, nowise disconcerted by such recent efforts as that of Professor Royce, in the direction of the rejection of the category of causality in the interests of idealistic thought, has turned to mind, in its unmeasured spontaneity, alike for the unity of the universe in

OF CAL

the unity of Reason, and for the conception of supreme Personal Being and Potency, wherein to find rational satisfaction and repose.

It has, we may make passing remark here, perceived how thoroughly futile must remain any endeavour of modern thought to flee the category of causality. Hence its perception of what a chief, or, as the Germans say, Haupt problem in religion and philosophy causation really is, and hence its more adequate treatment of the causal problem-in Germany at least, where, as we have indicated, work of notable excellence has recently been done-from the historical and systematic side, with which, however, we are here less concerned than with the critical and speculative aspects. Not only the metaphysical side of the causal problem has, as in pre- Kantian days, received attention, but the theoretic problem, from the side of knowledge, has, in post-Kantian philosophy, received much more adequate treatment. For Professor Riehl the causality principle remains only a subjective one, a necessary postulate to thought, as it seems, for the working out of our experience problems, but not a law of objective Giltigkeit or validity. He distinguishes between the law of causality and the concept of causality, the former being to him valid only for appearances, the latter not being limited to appearances. The causal law, with him, gives form to our experience, and determines its universal form (allgemeine Form) for natural law. But his

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thought oscillates between positions somewhat akin to those of Kant, on the one hand, and to those of Spencer, on the other, with whom he subsumes the causal axiom under that of the conservation of energy, so that we have no thoroughgoing result. Among those who are more or less with Riehl in respect of the intellectual rise-the logical (as by Herbart) and not merely (as by Spencer and Mill) psychological justification — of the causal concept, are Lotze, Wundt, Hartmann, and Volkelt. Comte, and those who are to-day descended from him by intellectual generation, regard, in their antagonism to the intellectualist theory, the causal connection as logically without value and superfluous from the scientific side. Riehl stands with Trendelenburg, Herbart, Goering, Spencer, and others, who bring cause and effect into a relation of identity, and make the highest of natural laws entirely matters of

course.

It would take a historico-critical survey, out of keeping with our present purpose, to show with what keenness the core of the causal concept has in recent philosophical development been sought in connection with the determination of the ontological significance of the concept of causality. Theistic philosophy has not, we come back to say, found any more reason why God should not exist through all the physical energies of that world-order whereby God phenomenally presents Himself to us, than why the spirit of man should not exist in

controlling sway over his own physical powers, correlated as these are to the world-forces. In this necessary and natural rise to a Supreme Mind, in which the thought and force of the world harmoniously centre, as our mode of interpreting the phenomena of the universe, we seem to have an always increasing argument for the Being of God, as the free First Cause and the self-determining Will. "The causality of self-consciousness-the causality that creates and incessantly recreates in the light of its own Idea, and by the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self-consciousness purely― is the only complete causality, because it is the only form of being that is free." This is, however, very far from the confinement or restriction of cause as something which subjectivism allows not beyond or without the sphere of subjective consciousness. Nor should it remain unsaid that the emphasis which has not been wanting on the significance of the volitional type of causation, as that with which we are in our own actual experience familiarised, has been justified by the needs of the time. Yes, even though we grant that the validity of the causal law may not be proved by such theories of its psychological origin as that, for example, of Maine de Biran-the "French Kant." George John Romanes has recently, in his 'Thoughts on Religion,' given decided adhesion to the doctrine that all causation is volitional, "derived from that known mode of existence which alone gives us the