s now that a man may write
what neither he nor anybody can understand. Antoninus tells us (xii. 10)
to look at things and see what they are, resolving them into the
material [Greek: hyle], the casual [Greek: aition], and the relation
[Greek: anaphora], or the purpose, by which he seems to mean something
in the nature of what we call effect, or end. The word Caus ([Greek:
aitia]) is the difficulty. There is the same word in the Sanscrit
(hetu); and the subtle philosophers of India and of Greece, and
the less subtle philosophers of modern times, have all used this word,
or an equivalent word, in a vague way. Yet the confusion sometimes may
be in the inevitable ambiguity of language rather than in the mind of
the writer, for I cannot think that some of the wisest of men did not
know what they intended to say. When Antoninus says (iv. 36), "that
everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be,"
he might be supposed to say what some of the Indian philosophers have
said, and thus a profound truth might be converted into a gross
absurdity. But he says, "in a manner," and in a manner he said true; and
in another manner, if you mistake his meaning, he said false. When Plato
said, "Nothing ever is, but is always becoming" ([Greek: aei
gignetai]), he delivered a text, out of which we may derive something;
for he destroys by it not all practical, but all speculative notions of
cause and effect. The whole series of things, as they appear to us, must
be contemplated in time, that is in succession, and we conceive or
suppose intervals between one state of things and another state of
things, so that there is priority and sequence, and interval, and Being,
and a ceasing to Be, and beginning and ending. But there is nothing of
the kind in the Nature of Things. It is an everlasting continuity (iv.
45; vii. 75). When Antoninus speaks of generation (x. 26), he speaks of
one cause ([Greek: aitia]) acting, and then another cause taking up the
work, which the former left in a certain state, and so on; and we might
perhaps conceive that he had some notion like what has been called "the
self-evolving power of nature;" a fine phrase indeed, the full import of
which I believe that the writer of it did not see, and thus he laid
himself open to the imputation of being a follower of one of the Hindu
sects, which makes all things come by evolution out of nature or matter,
or out of something which takes the place of Deity, but is no