At first sight, this question may seem to be completely decided by our fundamental convictions respecting cause and effect, and by the axioms which have been propounded by almost all writers, and have obtained universal currency among reasoners on this subject. That the cause must precede the effect,--that the effect must follow the cause,--are, it might seem, self-evident truths, assumed and assented to by all persons in all reasonings in which those notions occur. Such a doctrine is commonly asserted in general terms, and seems to be verified in all the applications of the idea of cause. A heavy body produces motion by its weight; the motion produced is subsequent in time to the pressure which the weight exerts. In a machine, bodies push or strike each other, and so produce a series of motions; each motion, in this case, is the result of the motions and configurations which have preceded it. The whole series of such motions employs time; and this time is filled up and measured by the series of causes and effects, the effects being, in their turn, causes of other effects. This is the common mode of apprehending the universal course of events, in which the chain of causation, and the progress of time, are contemplated as each the necessary condition and accompaniment of the other. But this, the Critic remarks, is not true in _direct_ causation. 'If the antecedence and consequence in question be understood as the interposition of an interval of time, however small, between the action of the cause and the production of the effect, we regard it as inadmissible. In the production of motion by force, for instance, though the effect be cumulative with continued exertion of the cause, yet each elementary or individual action is, to our apprehension, _instanter_ accompanied with its corresponding increment of momentum in the body moved. In all dynamical {195} reasonings no one has ever thought of interposing an instant of time between the action and its resulting momentum; nor does it appear necessary.' This is so evident, that it appears strange it should have the air of novelty; yet, so far as I am aware, the matter has never before been put in the same point of view. But this being the case, the question occurs, how it is that time _seems_ to be employed in the progress from cause to effect? How is it that the opinion of the effect being subsequent to the cause has generally obtained? And to this the Critic's answer is obvious:--it is so in cases of indirect or of _cumulative_ effect. If a ball _A_ strikes another, _B_, and puts it in motion, and _B_ strikes _C_, and puts it in motion, _A_'s impact may be considered as the cause, though not the direct cause, of _C_'s motion. Now time, namely the time of _B_'s motion after it is struck by _A_, and before it strikes _C_, intervenes between _A_'s impact and the beginning of _C_'s motion: that is, between the cause and its effect. In this sense, the effect is subsequent to the cause. Again, if a