Note 30 — Chapter XXI · OF THE EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL CAUSATION.

One of the most rising thinkers of the new generation in France, M. Taine (who has given, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the most masterly analysis, at least in one point of view, ever made of the present work), though he rejects, on this and similar points of psychology, the intuition theory in its ordinary form, nevertheless assigns to the law of causation, and to some other of the most universal laws, that certainty beyond the bounds of human experience, which I have not been able to accord to them. He does this on the faith of our faculty of abstraction, in which he seems to recognise an independent source of evidence, not indeed disclosing truths not contained in our experience, but affording an assurance which experience cannot give, of the universality of those which it does contain. By abstraction M. Taine seems to think that we are able, not merely to analyse that part of nature which we see, and exhibit apart the elements which pervade it, but to distinguish such of them as are elements of the system of nature considered as a whole, not incidents belonging to our limited terrestrial experience. I am not sure that I fully enter into M. Taine's meaning; but I confess I do not see how any mere abstract conception, elicited by our minds from our experience, can be evidence of an objective fact in universal Nature, beyond what the experience itself bears witness of; or how, in the process of interpreting in general language the testimony of experience, the limitations of the testimony itself can be cast off.