extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into
the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy of observation
into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe
that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any
rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a
co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most
concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself
to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for God ~Theos~
from a root which gives the meaning "to set in order," and the
Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, _Regin_.[90-1] Thus the
abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought.
Let us examine its meaning.

Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for
the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have
been of the relations of "cause and effect." Startled by the criticisms
of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres
of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at
first included the "principle of sufficient reason'[TN-6] in the laws of
thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and
therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it
to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools,
Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but
"uniformity of sequence."

It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the
first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into
the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw,
material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term "cause"
in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after
time, we have "uniformity of sequence." Suppose the constitution of the
race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few
moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should,
if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to
the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this
conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must
complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause
to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in
some instances f