The sequence of an effect to its cause has only a verbal resemblance to the sequence of a logical consequent to its reason. We declare categorically that every change has a cause which precedes it. Logical sequence is, on the other hand, as the very name of the {96} judgment shows, hypothetical, and may possibly not represent any actual occurrence, besides being, what causation is not, independent of time. A particular case of causation may be hypothetical in respect to our belief that it actually occurred; never the law of causation itself as a general truth. And the same distinction applies with even greater force to the alleged connection between a logical disjunction and a physical reaction. When I say A is either B or C, but not both, there is only this much resemblance, that both cases involve the ideas of equality and of opposition. From the admission that A is not B, I infer that it is C, or, contrariwise, from the admission that it is B, I infer that it is not C, and in both instances with the same certainty; but this does not prove that the earth attracts the moon as much as the moon attracts the earth, only in opposite directions; nor yet that in certain instances all the heat lost by one body is gained by another. Kant had learned this much from Hume, that causation is essentially a relation of antecedence and consequence in time; and apparently his way of "categorising" the relation--_i.e._, of proving its apriority--is to represent it as the logical form of reason and consequent masquerading, so to speak, under the intuitional time-form. Yet he frequently speaks of our senses as being affected by things in themselves, implying that the resulting sensations are somehow caused by those otherwise unknown entities. But since things in themselves do not, according to Kant, exist in space and time, they cannot be causally related to phenomena or to anything else. In his criticism of Pure Reason, properly so called--that is, of inferences made by human faculty with {97} regard to questions transcending all experience--Kant shows that of such things nothing can be known. The ideality of time and space once taken as proved, this amount of agnosticism seems to follow as a matter of course. It is idle to speculate about the possible extent or duration of a universe that cannot be described in terms of coexistence and succession. For each of us at the dissolution of our bodily organism time itself, and therefore existence as alone we conceive it, comes to an end. The law of causation, applying as it does to phenomena alone, offers no evidence for the existence of a God who transcends phenomena. Kant, however, is not satisfied with such a simple and summary procedure as this. He tries to show, with most unnecessary pedantry, that the conditional synthesis of the Understanding inevitably leads thought on to the unconditional synthesis of the Reason only to find itself lost in a hopeless welter of paralogisms and self-contradictions.