self may come
within its supreme dominion.

But to the very last the idea of causation retains the traces of its
origin. For in the first place every step in this building up of science
assumes a permanence underlying all phenomena. We cannot believe that
the future will be like the past except because we believe that there is
something permanent which was in the past and will be in the future. And
this assumption of something permanent in things around us comes from
the consciousness of something permanent within us. We know our own
permanence. Whatever else we know or do not know about ourselves, we are
sure of our own personal identity through successive periods of life.
And as our explanation of things outside begins by classing them with
things inside we still continue to ascribe permanence to whatever
underlies phenomena even when we have long ceased to ascribe individual
wills to any except beings like ourselves. And without this assumption
of permanence our whole science would come to the ground.

And in the second place let it be remembered that we began with the will
causing the motions of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know, no
other power in us to affect external nature than by setting something in
motion. We can move our limbs, and by so doing move other things, and by
so doing avail ourselves of the laws of Nature to produce remoter
effects. But, except by originating motion, we cannot act at all. And,
accordingly, throughout all science the attempt is made to reduce all
phenomena to motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action,
electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to reduce to vibrations or
undulations, that is, to motion of some sort or other. The mind seems to
find a satisfaction when a change of whatever kind is shown to be, or
possibly to be, the result of movement. And so too all laws of Nature
are then felt to be satisfactorily explained when they can be traced to
some force exhibited in the movement of material particles. The law of
Gravitation has an enormous evidence in support of it considered simply
as a fact. And yet how many attempts have been made to represent it as
the result of vortices or of particles streaming in all directions and
pressing any two bodies together that lie in their path! The facts which
establish it are enough. Why then these attempts? What is felt to be yet
wanting? What is felt to be wanting is something to show that it is the
result of some sort of