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GENERAL SURVEY. 21
ever, does not place the principle of sufficient reason in
Logic, as is now the custom, but in Ontology. True, in
71 he urges the necessity of not confounding the principle
of sufficient reason of knowing with that of cause and effect ;
still he does not clearly determine here where in the difference
consists. Indeed, he himself mistakes the one for the other ;
for he quotes instances of cause and effect in confirmation
of the principium rationis sttfficientis in this very chapter,
de ratione sufficienie, 70, 74, 75, 77, which, had he really
wished to preserve that distinction, ought rather to have
been quoted in the chapter de causis of the same work.
In said chapter he again brings forward precisely similar
instances, and once more enunciates the principium cogno-
scendi ( 876), which does not certainly belong to it, having
which serves to introduce the im
been already discussed, yet
mediately foliowing clear and definite distinction between this
principle and the law of causality, 881-884. Principium,
he continues, dicitur id, quod in se continet rationem alterius ;
and he distinguishes three kinds : 1. PRINCIPIUM FIENDI
(causa), which he defines as ratio actualitatis alterius, e.g.,
si lapis calescit, ignis aut radii solares sunt rationes, cur
calor lapidi insit. 2. PRINCIPIUM ESSENDI, which he
defines as ratio possibilitatis alterius; in eodem exemplo,
ratio possibilitatis, cur lapis calorem recipere possit, est
in essentia seu modo compositionis lapidis. This last con
ception seems to me inadmissible. If it has any mean
ing at all, possibility means correspondence with the
general conditions of experience known to us a priori, as
Kant has sufficiently shown. From these conditions we
know, with respect to Wolf s instance of the stone, that
changes are possible as effects proceeding
from causes : we
know, that is, that one state can succeed another, if the
former contains the conditions for the latter. In this case
we find, as effect, the state of being warm in the stone ;
as cause, the preceding state of a limited capacity for