We call something a
cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell
what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is
something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
attributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The
thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes this
singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the
relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
themselves embedded,--time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from
what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object
for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
be affected.

But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first
place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
second it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relations
of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality,
no 'nature,' is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_
of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of the
world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.' The matrix and the items,
each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
rest. The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which
demands that if any one part be posited alone all the o