professes to be complete, none of them can with reason be excluded, except
such as have already been implied in the words used for describing the
effect; nor by including even these would there be incurred any but a
merely verbal impropriety.
§ 5. There is a case of causation which calls for separate notice, as it
possesses a peculiar feature, and presents a greater degree of complexity
than the common case. It often happens that the effect, or one of the
effects, of a cause, is, not to produce of itself a certain phenomenon,
but to fit something else for producing it. In other words, there is a
case of causation in which the effect is to invest an object with a
certain property. When sulphur, charcoal, and nitre are put together in
certain proportions and in a certain manner, the effect is, not an
explosion, but that the mixture acquires a property by which, in given
circumstances, it will explode. The various causes, natural and
artificial, which educate the human body or the human mind, have for their
principal effect, not to make the body or mind immediately do any thing,
but to endow it with certain properties—in other words, to give assurance
that in given circumstances certain results will take place in it, or as
consequences of it. Physiological agencies often have for the chief part
of their operation to _predispose_ the constitution to some mode of
action. To take a simpler instance than all these: putting a coat of white
paint upon a wall does not merely produce in those who see it done, the
sensation of white; it confers on the wall the permanent property of
giving that kind of sensation. Regarded in reference to the sensation, the
putting on of the paint is a condition of a condition; it is a condition
of the wall’s causing that particular fact. The wall may have been painted
years ago, but it has acquired a property which has lasted till now, and
will last longer; the antecedent condition necessary to enable the wall to
become in its turn a condition, has been fulfilled once for all. In a case
like this, where the immediate consequent in the sequence is a property
produced in an object, no one now supposes the property to be a
substantive entity “inherent” in the object. What has been produced is
what, in other language, may be called a state of preparation in an object
for producing an effect. The ingredients of the gunpowder have been
brought into a state of preparation for exploding as soon as the other
conditions of an explosion shall have occurred. In the case of the
gunpowder, this state of preparation consists in a certain collocation of
its particles relatively to one another. In the example of the wall, it
consists in a new collocation of two things relatively to each other—the
wall and the paint. In the example of the molding influences on the human
mind, its being a collocation at all is only conjectural; for, even on the
materialistic hypothesis, it would remain to be proved that the increased