All the same, he tried. The big man slowly got down off the table, removed the cigar from his mouth, placed it carefully on the edge of the table, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, said,All right, young fellow, youre going to get hurt. You’re asking for it. Any time you want to quit that’s all you have to do, just say so. Rob felt Linda Carroll would hardly leave him to stand on the front porch, regardless of what she might be doing. She certainly would look through one of the windows to find out who was calling, and when she had learned the identity of her visitor, Rob was sure that he would be admitted. His ears heard a faint sound immediately on the other side of the heavy front door. He had the feeling that he was being carefully scrutinized. Yet nothing else happened. He stood there on the porch until the seconds ripened into a full two minutes. Angry, he rang the chimes twice in rapid succession. Put the safety on the gun and ran towards the shelter of some trees — because Id heard a car coming. Metaphysicians, however, have probed the question deeper, and given an account of Substance considerably more satisfactory than this. Substances are usually distinguished as Bodies or Minds. Of each of these, philosophers have at length provided us with a definition which seems unexceptionable. Preface To The Third And Fourth Editions. 63 Whatwere her exact words? Can you remember? I said:Youre screwy, Charley. That’s Mrs. Ruth Wendel from New York City. I met her last night. She’s got dough in lots. Here for a divorce. Staunton Irvine turned the sheet of paper. The second page was blank, there were no more questions. A friend got him for me. That is, he put Irvine in touch with me. 38 Listen, I said at last, I want to marry you. I said:You either have it or you dont. You haven’t, or you’d know what I mean. Now get back and get busy. Just call the place here and ask for 217 and tell me. I’ll get in touch with you if I want you; if anything comes up call me here. Get it? According to the theory in question, Mind, or to speak move precisely, Will, is the only cause of phenomena. The type of Causation, as well as the exclusive source from which we derive the idea, is our own voluntary agency. Here, and here only (it is said), we have direct evidence of causation. We know that we can move our bodies. Respecting the phenomena of inanimate nature, we have no other direct knowledge than that of antecedence and sequence. But in the case of our voluntary actions, it is affirmed that we are conscious of power before we have experience of results. An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness of effort,of force exerted, of power in action, which is necessarily causal, or causative. This feeling of energy or force, inherent in an act of will, is knowledge a priori; assurance, prior to experience, that we have the power of causing effects. Volition, therefore, it is asserted, is something more than an unconditional antecedent; it is a cause, in a different sense from that in which physical phenomena are said to cause one another: it is an Efficient Cause. From this the transition is easy to the further doctrine, that Volition is the sole Efficient Cause of all phenomena. “It is inconceivable that dead force could continue unsupported for a moment beyond its creation. We can not even conceive of change or phenomena without the energy of a mind. “The word action itself, says another writer of the same school, “has no real significance except when applied to the doings of an intelligent agent. Let any one conceive, if he can, of any power, energy, or force inherent in a lump of matter. Phenomena may have the semblance of being produced by physical causes, but they are in reality produced, say these writers, by the immediate agency of mind. All things which do not proceed from a human (or, I suppose, an animal) will proceed, they say, directly from divine will. The earth is not moved by the combination of a centripetal and a projectile force; this is but a mode of speaking, which serves to facilitate our conceptions. It is moved by the direct volition of an omnipotent Being, in a path coinciding with that which we deduce from the hypothesis of these two forces. § 1. From the Fallacies which are properly Prejudices, or presumptions antecedent to, and superseding, proof, we pass to those which lie in the incorrect performance of the proving process. And as Proof, in its widest extent, embraces one or more, or all, of three processes, Observation, Generalization, and Deduction, we shall consider in their order the errors capable of being committed in these three operations. And first, of the first mentioned. The former of these requisites is that to which our attention will be exclusively directed in the present chapter. Then he heard another scream. Faint. Where was it coming from? The always acute and often profound author ofAn Outline of Sematology (Mr. B. H. Smart) justly says, Locke will be much more intelligible, if, in the majority of places, we substitute the knowledge of for what he calls ‘the Idea of’ (p. 10). Among the many criticisms on Locke’s use of the word Idea, this is the one which, as it appears to me, most nearly hits the mark; and I quote it for the additional reason that it precisely expresses the point of difference respecting the import of Propositions, between my view and what I have spoken of as the Conceptualist view of them. Where a Conceptualist says that a name or a proposition expresses our Idea of a thing, I should generally say (instead of our Idea) our Knowledge, or Belief, concerning the thing itself. But the moral causes of opinions, though with most persons the most powerful of all, are but remote causes; they do not act directly, but by means of the intellectual causes; to which they bear the same relation that the circumstances called, in the theory of medicine,predisposing causes, bear to exciting causes. Indifference to truth can not, in and by itself, produce erroneous belief; it operates by preventing the mind from collecting the proper evidences, or from applying to them the test of a legitimate and rigid induction; by which omission it is exposed unprotected to the influence of any species of apparent evidence which offers itself spontaneously, or which is elicited by that smaller quantity of trouble which the mind may be willing to take. As little is Bias a direct source of wrong conclusions. We can not believe a proposition only by wishing, or only by dreading, to believe it. The most violent inclination to find a set of propositions true, will not enable the weakest of mankind to believe them without a vestige of intellectual grounds—without any, even apparent, evidence. It acts indirectly, by placing the intellectual grounds of belief in an incomplete or distorted shape before his eyes. It makes him shrink from the irksome labor of a rigorous induction, when he has a misgiving that its result may be disagreeable; and in such examination as he does institute, it makes him exert that which is in a certain measure voluntary, his attention, unfairly, giving a larger share of it to the evidence which seems favorable to the desired conclusion, a smaller to that which seems unfavorable. It operates, too, by making him look out eagerly for reasons, or apparent reasons, to support opinions which are conformable, or resist those which are repugnant, to his interests or feelings; and when the interests or feelings are common to great numbers of persons, reasons are accepted and pass current, which would not for a moment be listened to in that character if the conclusion had nothing more powerful than its reasons to speak in its behalf. The natural or acquired partialities of mankind are continually throwing up philosophical theories, the sole recommendation of which consists in the premises they afford for proving cherished doctrines, or justifying favorite feelings; and when any one of these theories has been so thoroughly discredited as no longer to serve the purpose, another is always ready to take its place. This propensity, when exercised in favor of any widely-spread persuasion or sentiment, is often decorated with complimentary epithets; and the contrary habit of keeping the judgment in complete subordination to evidence, is stigmatized by various hard names, as skepticism, immorality, coldness, hard-heartedness, and similar expressions according to the nature of the case. But though the opinions of the generality of mankind, when not dependent on mere habit and inculcation, have their root much more in the inclinations than in the intellect, it is a necessary condition to the triumph of the moral bias that it should first pervert the understanding. Every erroneous inference, though originating in moral causes, involves the intellectual operation of admitting insufficient evidence as sufficient; and whoever was on his guard against all kinds of inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken for conclusive, would be in no danger of being led into error even by the strongest bias. There are minds so strongly fortified on the intellectual side, that they could not blind themselves to the light of truth, however really desirous of doing so; they could not, with all the inclination in the world, pass off upon themselves bad arguments for good ones. If the sophistry of the intellect could be rendered impossible, that of the feelings, having no instrument to work with, would be powerless. A comprehensive classification of all those things which, not being evidence, are liable to appear such to the understanding, will, therefore, of itself include all errors of judgment arising from moral causes, to the exclusion only of errors of practice committedagainst better knowledge..