Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY. 315
tion, distribution, shock, ignition, analysis, charging,
isolation, discharging, electric current, &c. &c., to this
schema we are able to reduce and even to direct the effect ;
but of the process itself we know nothing : that remains
an x. Here therefore cause and effect are completely
heterogeneous, their connection is unintelligible, and we
see bodies show great susceptibity to causal influences, the
nature of which remains a secret for us. Moreover in pro
portion as we mount higher in the scale, the effect seems
to contain more, the cause less. When we reach organic
Nature therefore, in which the phenomenon of life presents
itself, this is the case in a far higher degree still. If, as is
done in China, we fill a pit with decaying wood, cover it
with leaves from the same tree as the wood, and pour a
solution of sulphur repeatedly over it, an abundant crop of
edible mushrooms will spring up. A world of rapidly
moving infiisoria will arise from a little hay well watered.
"What a difference lies here between effect and cause !
How much more does the former seem to contain than the
latter ! When we compare the seed, sometimes centuries,
nay even thousands of years old, with the tree, or the soil
with the specifically and strikingly different juices of in
numerable plants some healthy, some poisonous, some
again nutritious which spring from the same earth, upon
which the same sun shines and the same rain falls, all
resemblance ceases, and with it all comprehensibility for
us. For here causality already appears in increased
potency : that is, as stimulus and as susceptibility for
stimulus. The schema of cause and effect alone has re
mained ; we know that this is cause, that effect ; but we
know nothing whatever of the nature and disposition of
causality. Between cause and effect there is not only no
qualitative resemblance, but no quantitative relation : the
relatively greater importance of the effect as compared with
its cause increases more and more; the effect of the