o
in regard to us is that we apply it, whether we remark it or not,
whether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The
question is not to eliminate the particularity of the phenomenon wherein
it appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a
man, in order immediately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner,
the necessity of a cause for every event that begins to exist. Here it
is not because I am the same, or have been affected in the same manner
in several different cases, that I have come to this general and
abstract conception. A leaf falls; at the same moment I think, I
believe, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A
man has been killed; at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this
death must have a cause. Each one of these facts contains particular and
variable circumstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit,
both of them can not but have a cause. Now I am perfectly able to
disengage the universal from the particular in regard to the first fact
as well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the
first quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of
causality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the
second, nor in the third, nor in the thousandth; for a thousandth is not
nearer than the first to the infinite--to absolute universality. It is
the same, and still more evidently, with _necessity_. Pay particular
attention to this point; if necessity is not in the first fact, it can
not be in any; for necessity can not be formed little by little, and by
successive increments. If, on the first murder I see, I do not exclaim
that this murder had necessarily a cause, at the thousandth murder,
although it shall be proved that all the others had causes, I shall have
the right to think that this murder has, very probably, also a cause,
but I shall never have the right to say that it _necessarily_ had a
cause. But when universality and necessity are already in a single case,
that case is sufficient to entitle me to deduce them from it,"[225] and
we may add, also, to affirm them of every other event that may
transpire.

[Footnote 225: Cousin, "True, Beautiful, and Good," pp. 57, 58.]

The following _schema_ will exhibit the generally accepted results of
this method of analysis applied to the phenomena of thought:

(i.) _Universal and necessary principles, or primitive judgments from
whence is