Some, and particularly Reid, have regarded man's voluntary agency as the true type of causation and the exclusive source of the idea. The facts of inanimate nature, they argue, exhibit only antecedence and sequence, while in volition (and this would distinguish it from physical causes) we are conscious, prior to experience, of power to produce effects: volition, therefore, whether of men or of God, must be, they contend, an efficient cause, and the only one, of all phenomena. But, in fact, they bring no positive evidence to show that we could have known, apart from experience, that the effect, e.g. the motion of the limbs, would follow from the volition, or that a volition is more than a physical cause. In lieu of positive evidence, they appeal to the supposed conceivableness of the direct action of will on matter, and inconceivableness of the direct action of matter on matter. But there is no inherent law, to this effect, of the conceptive faculty: it is only because our voluntary acts are, from the first, the most direct and familiar to us of all cases of causation, that men, as is seen from the structure of languages (e.g. their active and passive voices, and impersonations of inanimate objects), get the _habit_ of borrowing them to explain other phenomena by a sort of original Fetichism. Even Reid allows that there is a tendency to assume volition where it does not exist, and that the belief in it has its sphere gradually limited, in proportion as fixed laws of succession among external objects are discovered.