lowest races of the present day, but, as I have myself given evidence to
show, likewise by animals and infants[21]. And therefore, it appears to
me probable that those psychologists are right who argue that the idea
of cause is intuitive, in the same sense that the ideas of space and
time are intuitive--i.e. the instinctive or [inherited] effect of
ancestral experience.

Now if it is thus a matter of certainty that the recognition of
causality in Nature is co-extensive with, and even anterior to, the
human mind, it appears to me no less certain that the first attempt at
assigning a cause of this or that observed event in Nature--i.e. the
first attempts at a rational explanation of the phenomena of
Nature--must have been of an anthropopsychic kind. No other explanation
was, as it were, so ready to hand as that of projecting into external
Nature the agency of volition, which was known to each individual as the
apparent fountain-head of causal activity so far as he and his
neighbours were concerned. To reach this most obvious explanation of
causality in Nature, it did not require that primitive man should know,
as we know, that the very conception of causality arises out of our
sense of effort in voluntary action; it only required that this should
be the fact, and then it must needs follow that when any natural
phenomenon was thought about at all with reference to its causality, the
cause inferred should be one of a psychical kind. I need not wait to
trace the gradual integration of this anthropopsychic hypothesis from
its earliest and most diffused form of what we may term polypsychism
(wherein the causes inferred were almost as personally numerous as the
effects contemplated), through polytheism (wherein many effects of a
like kind were referred to one deity, who, as it were, took special
charge over that class), up to monotheism (wherein all causation is
gathered up into the monopsychism of a single personality): it is enough