means of action propagated through a series of intervening parts; or
that it is able to direct only some organs, and not others, or cannot
direct even those, if by some accident they have become seriously
deranged. A strong-armed blockhead is not the less obviously able to
pump up water because the terms 'muscular contractility' and
'atmospheric pressure' are as heathen Greek to him; or because the
pump-handle, which alone is directly moved by him, touches, not the
water itself, but only the first link in a chain of mechanism connecting
it with the water; or because, if the sucker of the pump got choked, or
the well were to dry up, it would be vain for him to go on moving the
pump-handle. Blockhead as he is, nothing of all this in the least
diminishes his conviction that as long as the pump continues in order
and there remains water in the well, he can oblige the water to rise by
moving the pump-handle; nor can anything analogous prevent the mind from
feeling that whenever, in ordinary circumstances, it wills that the
limbs be moved, the limbs not only will be moved, but cannot help being
moved accordingly. But it is simply impossible that, from the exercise
of volitions which it knows will be obeyed, the mind should not receive
the sensation of exercising causal power; and having thus got the
sensation, it has nothing to do but to copy the sensation in order to
get the idea of causal power. _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_;
the first step being taken the others cost nothing. The mind having, by
introspection of its own operations, discovered what Hume, though
professing to look in the same direction, unaccountably contrived to
overlook--the idea, namely, of causal power--proceeds to apply that idea
to the connection of external phenomena. Not only do we, whenever we see
a horse or an ox walking of its own accord, infer that the animal walks
_because_ it wishes to walk; but having observed that, when a stone is
thrown into the air it invariably falls presently afterwards towards the
ground; that a magnet invariably attracts any light piece of iron placed
near it; that red-hot coals always burn; and that water always moistens,
we infer that the second constituent of each brace of phenomena takes
place _because_ of the first, meaning thereby that there is some strong
bond _connecting_ the two and _compelling_ one to follow the other. If
called upon to justify this inference, we may do so by reducing to
absurdity its