a more recent authority, and one speaking from the side of
physical science, Prof. Huxley writes:--

'The student of nature who starts from the axiom of the
universality of the law of causation, cannot refuse to admit an
eternal existence; if he admits the conservation of energy, he
cannot deny the possibility of an eternal energy; if he admits the
existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of consciousness, he
must admit the possibility, at any rate, of an eternal series of
such phenomena; and, if his studies have not been barren of the
best fruit of the investigation of nature, he will have enough
sense to see that, when Spinoza says, "Per Deum intelligo ens
absolute infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem infinitis
attributis," the God so conceived is one that only a very great
fool would deny, even in his heart. Physical science is as little
Atheistic as it is Materialistic[14].'

Now, if it thus belongs to the essence of our idea of causation that
finality must be reached somewhere, I do not know where this is so
likely to be reached as at that principle wherein the idea itself takes
its rise--viz. Mind. But, if so, the statement that any particular acts
of mind are uncaused ceases to present any character of self-evident
absurdity.

And the argument need not end here. For Mr. Herbert Spencer has shown
that our idea of causation, not merely requires a mind for its
occurrence, but that in every mind where it does occur it has been
directly formed out of experiences of effort in acts of volition. So
that whether we analyze the idea of cause as we actually discover it in
our own minds, or investigate the history of its genesis, we alike find,
as we might have antecedently expected, that it is dependent on our more
ultimate idea of mind as mind; the conception of causality is not, as a
matter of fact, original or primal, but derivative or secondary.
Therefore, if this conception necessarily involves the postulation of a
first cause, there can be no doubt that such a cause can only be
conceived as of the nature of mind. From which it follows that each
individual mind requires to be regarded--if it is regarded at all--as of
the nature of a first cause.

From this, however, it does not follow that each individual mind
requires to be regarded as wholly independent of all other causes, or as
never subject to any causal influence which may be exercise