The child, as it grows older, may learn to speak of the fire as having a power to burn. But that merely means, "if I touch it, it will burn me--or light paper if I hold the paper to it." Power, in fact, is incomplete causation, the presence of every condition but that one which, in Aristotelian phrase, turns potency into act. And it is in contradistinction to that idea of possibility that the idea of necessary connection comes in. When all the elements of the causal antecedent are combined the effect necessarily supervenes. Furthermore, the causal antecedent is thought of as necessary in contrast with the contingency of other antecedents whose connection with the effect is merely accidental. Finally, {84} the idea of production has been quoted as vitally distinguishing true causation from invariable sequence. But various myths, of which the story of Oedipus is the best known, show that primitive folk regard day and night as alternately producing one another, just as Polonius quotes their sequence as a type of logical necessity. Hume professed himself a Deist, but probably with no more seriousness than when he, or when Gibbon, called Christianity "our religion." At any rate, his philosophy destroys every argument for the existence of a Creator advanced in his own or in the preceding century. Nor need his particular theory of causation be invoked for the purpose. The most telling attack is on the argument from design. The apparent adaptation of means to ends in living organisms is quoted as evidence of their having been planned by a conscious intelligence. But, answers Hume, such an intelligence would itself exhibit marks of design, and so on for ever. Why not, then, stop at the animal organism as an ultimate fact? It was Shelley's unlucky demand for a solution of this difficulty that led to his expulsion from Oxford. It has been shown how the new analysis of mind cut the ground from under Berkeley's theism, and from under the metaphysical argument for human immortality. By denying the substantiality of the ego it also confirmed the necessitarianism of Spinoza. Hume seemed to think he could abate the unpopularity of this doctrine by interpreting the constant motivation of human actions as a mere relation of antecedence and consequence. But the decisive point was that he assimilated sequences in conscious behaviour to the unconscious sequences in physical events. Thus, for {85} the vulgar and the theologians, he remained what would now be called a materialist. KANT.