Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy of the Conditioned [pp. 472-510]

Philosophy of the Conditioned.
ning of time may, by a (slight!) confusion with regard to of
time and in time, be said to prevent our conceiving a beginning
of substance; but by no possibility can it be made to necessitate
the conception of beginning after beginning of phenomena in
endless succession. Motion is the most common appearance
which excites the causal judgment. My friend before me
raises his hand. There must have been a cause of the motion.
Does that mean that I cannot conceive that his hand was not
in existence before? Surely not. The question relates not to
change of existence or form, but to change of place. Is it the
motion which cannot be conceived to begin? That confounds,
in the doctrine, cause and substance, effect and quality-and
the motion does begin. Is it said we must conceive it to have
virtually existed in the will? If that is a continuation of the
same existence, we have all facts and possibilities resolved into
one existence.
(b) The law of causation at the lowest involves necessary
connection. Hamilton's principle only asserts that we must
think the substance in its present form was preceded by the
substance in some other form. The necessity of an antecedent
is confounded with a necessary antecedent. He is in exactly
the position he charges upon Brown; he gives us an antecedent,
but has eviscerated the necessity. The proposition "this substance must have existed in some former state," is confounded
with "this substance must have existed in some former state of
which this state is a necessary consequence."
(e) We think it also a clear affirmation of common sense that
the necessity of thinking a relation is a very different thing
from perceiving a necessary relation. Hume, as we have before
said, started the notion in respect to causation that ideas of
objects become associated by the laws of the mind, so that one
idea draws the other after it, and that we, feeling that the idea
draws the idea, conceive that the object is attached to the
object. That would do for a sceptic. Kant developed this
notion into the far-reaching principle that all necessity is only
a necessity of thought, and this will do for an idealist; if we
know nothing but ideas, the laws of connection among ideas
would seem to be all that we can know of necessary connection.
But common sense and Hamilton declare that we immediately
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