g causality:
and this causality does further influence the order of events in physical
nature. My pen or my tongue moves in consequence of this striving of
mine, though no doubt for such efforts to take place other physical
conditions must be presupposed, which are not wholly within my own
control. I am the cause, but not the whole or sole cause of these
physical disturbances in external nature: I am a cause but not an
uncaused cause. {40} My volition, though it is not the sole cause of the
event which I will, is enough to give me a conception of a cause which is
the sole cause of the events.

The attempt is of course sometimes made, as it was made by Hume, to
explain away this immediate consciousness of volition, and to say that
all that I immediately know is the succession of my subjective
experiences. It may be contended that I don't know, any more than in the
case of external phenomena, that because the thought of my lecture comes
first and the thought of putting my pen into the ink to write it comes
afterwards, therefore the one thought causes the other. Hence it is
important to point out that I have a negative experience with which to
contrast the positive experience. I do not _always_, even as regards my
own inward experiences, assume that succession implies Causality.
Supposing, as I speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly introduces
itself into the succession of my experiences: then I am conscious of no
such inner connexion between the new experience and that which went
before it. Then I am as distinctly conscious of passivity--of not
causing the succession of events which take place in my mind--as I am in
the other case of actively causing it. If the consciousness of
exercising activity is a delusion, why does not that delusion occur in
the one case as much as in the other? I hold then that in the
consciousness of {41} our own activity we get a real direct experience of
Causality. When Causality is interpreted to mean mere necessary
connexion--like the mathematical connexion between four and twice two or
the logical connexion between the premisses of a Syllogism and its
conclusion,--its nature is fundamentally misrepresented. The essence of
Causality is not necessary connexion but Activity. Such activity we
encounter in our own experience of volition and nowhere else.[2]

Now, if the only cause of which I am immediately conscious is the will of
a conscious rational being, is it not reasonabl