which the habit of insisting on an inviolable quantitative equivalence gathered consistency. The ascendancy of the latter seems in a similar manner to be referable to the prevalence of handicraft as its cultural ground. Stated negatively, it asserts that nothing appears in the effect but what was contained in the cause, in a manner which suggests the rule that nothing appears in the product of handicraft but what was present in the skill of the artificer. " Natural causes, " which are made much of in this middle period of modern science, are conceived to work according to certain " natural laws." These natural laws, laws of the " normal course " of things, are felt to tend to a rational end and to have something of a coercive force. So that Nature makes no mistakes. Nature does nothing in vain, Nature takes the most economical course to its end. Nature makes no jumps, etc. Under this law of natural causation everj
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effect must have a cause which resembles it in the particular respect which claims the inquirer'a attention. Among other consequences of this view it follows that, since the details as well as the whole of the material universe are construed to show adaptation to a preconceived end, this " natural order" of things must be the outcome of preexiatent design residing in the " first cause," which is postulated hy virtue of this imputed design and is designated the " Great Artificer." There is an element of conation in this original modern postulate of cause and effect. The shadow of the artificer, with his intelligence and manual skill, is forever in the background of the concepts of natural law. The " cause " dealt with in a given case is not thought of as an effect ; and the effect is treated as a finality, not as a phase of a complex sequence of causation. When such a sequence is under inquiry, as in the earlier, pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, it is not handled as a cumulative sequence whose character may blindly change from better to worse, or conversely, at any point ; but rather as an unfolding of a certain prime cause in which is contained, implicitly, all that presently appears in explicit form.