_The remarkable nature of the facts._ These are remarkable, since they are common to all human experience. Everything that _happens_ has a cause. The same happening has always the same cause--or the same consequent the same antecedent. It is only familiarity with this great fact that prevents universal wonder at it, for, notwithstanding all the theories upon it, no one has ever really shown why it is so. That the same causes always produce the same effects is a proposition which expresses a fundamental fact of our knowledge, but the knowledge of this fact is purely empirical; we can show no reason why it should be a fact. Doubtless, if it were not a fact, there could be no so-called 'Order of Nature,' and consequently no science, no philosophy, or perhaps (if the irregularity were sufficiently frequent) no possibility of human experience. But although this is easy enough to show, it in no wise tends to show why the same causes should always produce the same effects. So manifest is it that our knowledge of the fact in question is only empirical, that some of our ablest thinkers, such as Hume and Mill, have failed to perceive even so much as the intellectual necessity of looking beyond our empirical knowledge of the fact to gain any explanation of the fact itself. Therefore they give to the world the wholly vacuous, or merely tautological theory of causation--viz. that of constancy of sequence within human observation[51]. If it be said of my argument touching causality, that it is naturalizing or materializing the super-natural or spiritual (as most orthodox persons will feel), my reply is that deeper thought will show it to be at least as susceptible of the opposite view--viz. that it is subsuming the natural into the super-natural, or spiritualizing the material: and a pure agnostic, least of all, should have anything to say as against either of these alternative points of view. Or we may state the matter thus: in as far as pure reason can have anything to say in the matter, she ought to incline towards the view of my doctrine spiritualizing the material, because it is pretty certain that we could know nothing about natural causation--even so much as its existence--but for our own volitions. _Free Will_[52]. Having read all that is said to be worth reading on the Free Will controversy, it appears to me that the main issues and their logical conclusions admit of being summed up in a very few words, thus:--