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say that the cause is not the stone itself but the weight or gravitation of the stone."
Those who have contended for a radical distinction between agents and patients have generally conceived the agent as that which causes some state of, or some change in the state of another object which is called the patient. But a little reflection will show that the license, we assume of speaking of phenomena as states of the various objects which take part in them (an artifice of which so much use has been made by some philo. sophers, Brown, in particular, for the apparent explanation of phenomena) is simply a sort of logical fiction, useful sometimes as one among several modes of expression but which should never be supposed to be the enunciation of a scientific truth. Even those attributes of an object which might seem with greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities its colour, hardness, shape and the like are in reality (as no one has painted out more clearly than Brown himself) phenomena of causation in which the substance is distinctly the agent or producing cause, the patient
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The distinc
tion is a logi
cal fiction.
