The trouble I have thus taken to meet criticisms and dissipate misapprehensions, I have taken because the attack {320} made on the special doctrine defended, is part of an attack on the ultimate doctrine underlying the deductive part of _First Principles_—the doctrine that the quantity of existence is unchangeable. I agree with Sir W. Hamilton that our consciousness of the necessity of causation, results from the impossibility of conceiving the totality of Being to increase or decrease. The proportionality of cause and effect is an implication: denial of it involves the assertion that some quantity of cause has disappeared without effect, or some quantity of effect has arisen without cause. I have asserted the _a priori_ character of the Second Law of Motion, _under the abstract form in which it is expressed_, simply because this, too, is an implication, somewhat more remote, of the same ultimate truth. And my sole reason for insisting on the validity of these intuitions, is that, on the hypothesis of Evolution, absolute uniformities in things have produced absolute uniformities in thoughts; and that necessary thoughts represent infinitely-larger accumulations of experiences than are formed by the observations, experiments, and reasonings of any single life. ENDNOTES TO _REPLIES TO CRITICISMS_. [24] _Principles of Psychology_, Second Edition, § 425, note. [25] _Le Sentiment Religieux_, par A. Grotz. Paris, J. Cherbuliez, 1870. [26] Instead of describing me as misunderstanding Kant on this point, Dr. Hodgson should have described Kant as having, in successive sentences, so changed the meanings of the words he uses, as to make either interpretation possible. At the outset of his _Critique of Pure Reason_, he says:—“The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by the said object, is sensation. That sort of intuition which relates to an object by means of sensation, is called an empirical intuition. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition, is called _phænomenon_. That which in the phænomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its _matter_;” [here, remembering the definition just given of phenomenon, objective existence is manifestly referred to] “but that which effects that the content of the phænomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its _form_” [so that _form_, as here applied, refers to objective existence]. “But that in which our sensations are merely arranged, and by which they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be itself sensation.” [In which sentence the word _form_ obviously refers to subjective existence.] At the outset, the ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘sensation’ are distinguished as objective and subjective respectively; and then, in the closing sentences, the _form_ is spoken of in connexion first with the one and then with the other, as though they were the same. [27] See _Fraser’s Magazine_ for May, 1873. [28] _First Principles_, § 26.