Substance and Shadow

cause with constitution. It is only the philoso- pher who is speculatively aux abois that ever finds himself drifting at this helpless and melancholy rate. In practice one never dreams of asking a cause for things^ for fixed existence, but only for the observed vicissitudes to which they are liable. Things we suppose to be created not caused. Phenomena^ that is, the mutations to which things are subject inwardly and out- wardly, we claim to be caused not created. Things have an absolute existence to sense, and never suggest the conception which is implie4 in all causation, that they exist for the sake of something else than themselves. The origin of things, or of finite existence, is a question of pure Philosophy, not of science, all whose attention goes to ascertaining the purely logical relations of unity and variety which characterize finite existence to our apprehension, and noting the purely phenomenal modifications to which its forms are incidentally and accidentally exposed The vulgar designation of the creator as a cause (the First cause) is owing exclusively to this inveterate habit among philosophers, of reducing questions of pure Philosophy (such for example, as the origin of existence) to ques* tions of science, to the extent of envisaging creation itself at last as a mere event in space and time. The question of creation which is a question not about any event in space and time, but about the origin of space and time them- selves, is a purely philosophic question, wholly insoluble by any scientific acumen, and disdain* >