Not only are we, during the whole period of our lives, witnesses of an incessant train of events; that is, of antecedents and consequents, between which, for the greater part, the order is constant; but these constant conjunctions are, of all things in the world, what we are {351} the most deeply interested in observing; for, on the knowledge of them, all our power of obtaining good and avoiding evil depends. From this, it necessarily follows, that between none of our ideas is the association more intimate and intense, than between antecedent and consequent, in the order of events. Whenever we perceive an event, the mind instantly flies to its antecedent. I hear words in the street; _event_: some one, of course, is making them; _antecedent_. My house is broken, and my goods are gone; _event_: a thief has taken them; _antecedent_. This is that remarkable case of association, in which the combination is _inseparable_; a case of so much importance in explaining some of the more mysterious phenomena of thought. Other instances of this remarkable phenomenon, to which we have already had occasion to advert, are, the sight of an object, and the ideas of its distance, its extension, and figure; the idea of colour, and the idea of extension; the idea of an object, and the idea of position and unity; the idea of one of my sensations, and the idea of myself. In no instance is this inseparable association more perfect, or its consequences more important, than in that between an event, and its antecedent. We cannot think of the one without thinking of the other. The two ideas are forced upon us at the same time; and by no effort of ours can they be disjoined. So necessarily, from the first moment of experience, are we employed in observing the constant conjunctions of events; and so deeply are we interested, in looking out for, and knowing the constant antecedent of every event, that the association becomes part of our being. The perception, or the idea, of an event, instantly brings up {352} the idea of its constant antecedent; definite and clear, if the antecedent is known; and indefinite and obscure, if it is unknown. Still, the idea of an event, of a change, without the idea of its cause, is impossible. That a cause means, and can mean nothing to the human mind, but constant antecedent, is no longer a point in dispute.[99] [Editor's footnote 99: Here again the author takes too sanguine a view of the amount of agreement hitherto attained among metaphysical philosophers. "That a cause means, and can mean, nothing to the human mind but constant antecedent" is so far from being "no longer a point in dispute" that it is denied with vehemence by a large numerical majority of philosophers; and its denial is perhaps the principal badge of one of the two schools which at this, as at most other times, bisect the philosophical world--the intuitional school and the experiential--_Ed._]