NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

has been recognized. Each idea is present to the mind in the spontaneous explanation which it offers to a certain class of facts. They divide the universe of events between them. In the one moiety, we have necessity, in the other, liberty; in the one, movements already conditioned by the forces at work, in the other, movements then and there conditioned by the power that initiates them. In their relations to each other, liberty is primary, and causation is secondary. Causation marks dependence, a dependence which, on its own level, can find no arrest, no matter how far we trace it. Events, follow them backward, forward, on either hand, are conditioned one upon another; forces are already at work accomplishing the tasks assigned them. But a first, an independent, an unconditioned force nowhere appears. Causal action, therefore, necessarily presents a fragmentary and partial character. Of it alone, there can be made up no whole, no universe; since the more we have, the more we demand to explain what we have. The events before us, like the section of a river, must flow into and flow out of the horizon. We can reach no beginning and no conclusion, nor even find diminution as we go backward, or increase as we go forward. The boundaries of our vision enlarge themselves in all directions, but are always illusory.

Liberty, on the contrary, to the extent of the events which spring from it, affords a complete commencement. We need go no farther back. An arrest is found in it, and the events which flow thence are explained by the form, impetus, and direction which it has imparted to them. Causation is necessarily finite in its manifestation; since it inheres in a power already put forth, and is conditioned to a given number and form of products. Liberty rests back on the agent, never goes forth from him, and partakes, in its possibilities, of the breadth and the limitations of his faculties. It commands more than the actual, to wit, the potential