reditary passage from
an invertebrate ancestry,--that such things should be, would surely
strike us as the most wonderful fact in this wonderful universe.

Now, although familiarity with this fact has made us forget its wonder
to the extent of virtually assuming that we know all about it,
philosophical enquiry shows that, besides empirically knowing it to be a
fact, we only know one other thing about it, viz.--that our knowledge of
it is derived from our own activity when we ourselves are causes. No
result of psychological analysis seems to me more certain than this[47].
If it were not for our own volitions, we should be ignorant of what we
can now not doubt, on pain of suicidal scepticism, to be the most
general fact of nature. Such, at least, seems to me by far the most
reasonable theory of our idea of causality, and is the one now most
generally entertained by philosophers of every school.

Now, to the plain man it will always seem that if our very notion of
causality is derived from our own volition--as our very notion of energy
is derived from our sense of effort in overcoming resistance by our
volition--presumably the truest notion we can form of that in which
causation objectively consists is the notion derived from that known
mode of existence which alone gives us the notion of causality at all.
Hence the plain man will always infer that all energy is of the nature
of will-energy, and all objective causation of the nature of subjective.
Nor is this inference confined to the plain man; the deepest
philosophical thinkers have arrived at substantially the same opinion,
e.g. Hegel, Schopenhauer. So that the direct and most natural
interpretation of causality in external nature which is drawn by
primitive thought in savages and young children, seems destined to
become also the ultimate deliverance of human thought in the highest
levels of its culture[48].

But, be this as it may, we are not concerned with any such questions of
abstract philosophical speculation. As pure agnostics they lie beyond
our sphere. Therefore, I allude to them only for the sake of showing
that there is nothing either in the science or philosophy of mankind
inimical to the theory of natural causation being the energizing of a
will objective to us. And we can plainly see that if such be the case,
and if that will be self-consistent, its operations, as revealed in
natural causation, must appear to us when considered _en bloc_ (or not
piece-me