to witness his triumph, he had turned away, from the contest, and the victory, because he was not to tread on softness, and to be refreshed with fragrance, as he moved along! In that knowledge which awaits your studies, in the various sciences to which your attention may be turned, you have a much nobler prize before you; and, therefore, I shall not hesitate to call forth occasionally all the vigour of your attention, at the risk of a little temporary fatigue, as often as it shall appear to me, that, by exciting you to more than ordinary intellectual activity, I can facilitate your acquisition of a reward, which the listless exertions of the indolent never can obtain, and which is as truly the prize of strenuous effort, as the Palms of the Circus or the Course. FOOTNOTES: [25] Essay concerning Human Understanding, book iv. c. 3. sec. 25, 26. [26] Epist. 65. LECTURE VII. ON POWER, CAUSE, AND EFFECT. My last Lecture, Gentlemen, was chiefly employed in examining _what it is_, which is the real object of inquiry, when we consider the phenomena of nature as successive; and we found, that, by an original principle of our constitution, we are led, from the mere observation of change, to believe, that, when similar circumstances recur, the changes, which we observed, will also recur in the same order,--that there is hence conceived by us to be a permanent relation of one event, as invariably antecedent, to another event, as invariably consequent,--and that this _permanent relation_ is all which constitutes _power_. It is a word, indeed, of much seeming mystery; but all which is supposed to be mysterious and perplexing in it vanishes, when it is regarded in its true light as only a short general term, expressive of invariable antecedence, or, in other words, of that, which cannot exist in certain circumstances, without being immediately followed by a certain definite event, which we denominate an effect, in reference to the antecedent, which we denominate a cause. To express, shortly, what appears to me to be the only intelligible meaning of the three most important words in physics, immediate invariable _antecedence_, is _power_,--the immediate invariable _antecedent_, in any sequence, is a _cause_,--the immediate invariable _consequent_ is the correlative _effect_.