body be put in motion by a series of impulses acting at finite intervals of time, all in the same direction, the motion at the end of all these intervals is the effect of all the impulses, and exists after they have all acted. It is the accumulated effect, and subsequent to each separate action of the cause. But in this case, each impulse produces its effect instantaneously, and the time is employed, not in the transition from any cause to its effect, but in the intervals between the action of the several causes, during which intervals the body goes on with the velocity already communicated to it. In each impulse, force produces motion: and the motion goes on till a new change takes place, by the same kind of action. The force may be said, in the language employed by the Critic, to be transformed into momentum; and in the successive impulses, successive portions of force are thus transformed; while in the intervening intervals, the force thus transformed into momentum is carried by the body from one place to another, where a new change awaits it. 'The cause is absorbed and transformed into effect, and therein treasured up.' Hence, as the Writer says, 'The time lost in cases of indirect physical causation is that consumed in the movements which take place among the parts of the mechanism set in action, by which the active forces so transformed into mechanism are transported over intervals of space to new points of action, the motion of matter in such cases being {196} regarded as a mere carrier of force':--and when force is directly counteracted by force, their mutual destruction must be conceived, as the Reviewer says, to be instantaneous. We can therefore hardly resist his conclusion, that men have been misled in assuming sequence as a feature in the relation of cause and effect; and we may readily assent to his suggestion, that sequence, when observed, is to be held as a sure indication of indirect action, accompanied with a movement of parts. But yet if we turn for a moment to other kinds of causation, we seem to be compelled at every step to recognize the truth of the usual maxim upon this subject, that effects are subsequent to causes. Is not poison, taken at a certain moment, the cause of disorder and death which follow at a _subsequent_ period? Is not a man's early prudence often the cause of his prosperity in _later_ life, and his folly, though for a moment it may produce gratification, _finally_ the cause of his ruin? And even in the case of mechanism, if, in a clock which goes rightly, we alter the length of the pendulum, is not this alteration the cause of an alteration which _afterwards_ takes place in the rate of the clock's going? Are not all these, and innumerable other cases, instances in which the usual notion of the effect following the cause is verified? and are they not irreconcileable with the new doctrine of cause and effect being simultaneous?