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processes can verify. The convenience of expression has fed to the extension of the term cause, not merely to remote agents, but even to the conditions of their action. Any one of all the circumstances necessary to an effect is spoken of as its cause, though no direct efficiency proceeds from it. In a stricter sense, the word cause includes only those antecedents which are active in the effect, and in a yet closer sense, the sense which belongs to it in the present discussion, the forces immediately operative in the fact before us. The cause is strictly contemporaneous with the effect, underlies it, momentarily occasions it. The antecedent effect had its antecedent cause, and though this cause may have been identical with the cause now operating, it remains a cause by virtue of its present activity. The effect is the immediate evidence of the cause; and though the last is prior in thought to the first, neither can exist an instant without the other. The sound of the steam-whistle is remotely attributable to the distant locomotive, is more immediately to be referred to the movement of the air and the tympanum, but finds its causes exactly in -the forces which sustain the movement, and the living powers which receive and interpret it. In this sense the cause is always and necessarily transcendental, out of the range of the senses, incapable of verification by any other than the very faculty which in the first instance yields the idea.

The statements of empirical philosophy are quite different from those now made. Says Bain, "The successions designated as Cause and Effect, are fixed in the mind by contiguity. Belief in external reality is anticipation of a given effect of a given antecedent; and the effects and causes are our own various sensations and movements." More clearly still does Mill speak of the notion as one of simple antecedence; while Spencer treats of it under the