Note (return) — Chapter VI

Now we affirm that the human mind has just as direct, immediate, and positive knowledge of cause as it has of effect. The idea of cause, the intuition power, is given in the immediate consciousness of mind as determining its own operations. Our first, and, in fact, our only presentation of power or cause, is that of self as willing. In every act of volition I am fully conscious that it is in my power to form a resolution or to refrain from it, to determine on this course of action or that; and this constitutes the immediate presentative knowledge of power. 249 The will is a power, a power in action, a productive power, and, consequently, a cause. This doctrine is stated with remarkable clearness and accuracy by Cousin: "If we seek the notion of cause in the action of one ball upon another, as was previously done by Hume, or in the action of the hand upon the ball, or the primary muscles upon the extremities, or even in the action of the will upon the muscles, as was done by M. Maine de Biran, we shall find it in none of these cases, not even in the last; for it is possible there should be a paralysis of the muscles which deprives the will of power over them, makes it unproductive, incapable of being a cause, and, consequently, of suggesting the notion of one. But what no paralysis can prevent is the action of the will upon itself, the production of a resolution; that is to say, the act of causation entirely mental, the primitive type of all causality, of which all external movements are only symbols more or less imperfect. The first cause for us, is, therefore, the will, of which the first effect is volition. This is at once the highest and the purest source of the notion of cause, which thus becomes identical with that of personality. And it is the taking possession, so to speak, of the cause, as revealed in will and personality, which is the condition for us of the ulterior or simultaneous conception of external, impersonal causes." 250