'atmospheric pressure' are as heathen Greek to him; or because the pump-handle, which alone is directly moved by him, touches, not the water itself, but only the first link in a chain of mechanism connecting it with the water; or because, if the sucker of the pump got choked, or the well were to dry up, it would be vain for him to go on moving the pump-handle. Blockhead as he is, nothing of all this in the least diminishes his conviction that as long as the pump continues in order and there remains water in the well, he can oblige the water to rise by moving the pump-handle; nor can anything analogous prevent the mind from feeling that whenever, in ordinary circumstances, it wills that the limbs be moved, the limbs not only will be moved, but cannot help being moved accordingly. But it is simply impossible that, from the exercise of volitions which it knows will be obeyed, the mind should not receive the sensation of exercising causal power; and having thus got the sensation, it has nothing to do but to copy the sensation in order to get the idea of causal power. _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_; the first step being taken the others cost nothing. The mind having, by introspection of its own operations, discovered what Hume, though professing to look in the same direction, unaccountably contrived to overlook--the idea, namely, of causal power--proceeds to apply that idea to the connection of external phenomena. Not only do we, whenever we see a horse or an ox walking of its own accord, infer that the animal walks _because_ it wishes to walk; but having observed that, when a stone is thrown into the air it invariably falls presently afterwards towards the ground; that a magnet invariably attracts any light piece of iron placed near it; that red-hot coals always burn; and that water always moistens, we infer that the second constituent of each brace of phenomena takes place _because_ of the first, meaning thereby that there is some strong bond _connecting_ the two and _compelling_ one to follow the other. If called upon to justify this inference, we may do so by reducing to absurdity its only possible alternative. If there be supposed to be no connection between two phenomena constituting one of those invariable sequences which we are accustomed to denominate cause and effect, the sequence which they constitute must needs be an unconnected sequence, and the only reason for styling one of the phenomena a cause is, that it is an antecedent which the other invariably follows. But according to this, as has been pointed out over and over again, day would be the cause of night, and night the cause of day, and tidal flux and reflux likewise would be each other's causes; and Mr. J. S. Mill has therefore proposed to interpolate a word, and to define the cause of a phenomenon as 'the antecedent on which it (the phenomenon) is invariably and _unconditionally_ consequent.'[30] I must, however, confess myself