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And therefore, in a continuous series, there are no immediately
adjacent terms. Dr. Stout’s own illustration brings this out—

β α a b
M
In a diagram like the accompanying b and β are, he argues,
“mediately conjoined,” but a and α are “immediately co-adjacent.”
Surely Dr. Stout forgets here that what can be intelligibly called “co-
adjacent” are not lines but points or positions on the lines. And
between any point in α and any point in a there are a plurality of
intermediate positions, except for the special case of the extreme left
point of a and the extreme right point of α. These, of course,
coalesce in the single point M, and there is therefore no connection,
mediate or immediate, left in this case.[99] The illustration, I think,
may serve to reveal a serious discrepancy in Dr. Stout’s theory. He
sees that relations presuppose a unity which is supra-relational, and
which he calls “continuous,” on the ground of its supra-relational
character. At the same time, to save the relational scheme from
condemnation as leading to the endless regress, he has to turn this
supra-relational unity itself into a sort of relation by calling it an
immediate connection between adjacent terms, and thus ascribing to
it the fundamental character of a discontinuous series. And I cannot
help regarding this procedure as unconscious evidence to the truth
of the principle, that what is not the truth about the whole of Reality is
not ultimately the truth about any reality.
 73. See the admirable account of the “natural conception” of the
world in the final chapter of Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbegriff.
74. May I say here once for all, that when I oppose practice to
intellectual speculation, I must be understood to mean by practice
the alteration by myself of some datum of given existence. The
activity of thought is thus for me not practical, precisely because the
“truths” which I know or contemplate are not quà truths given
existences operated upon and altered by the act of thinking.
75. Such a view of the mental life of the animal seems to have
been actually held, for instance, by the late Professor T. H. Green.
Yet see Green, Works, ii. 217.
76. Strictly speaking, the “solidity” or “impenetrability” of the
ultimate particles of matter, which is with Locke and Newton one of
the most prominent “primary” qualities, is not a “mathematical”
property, but it still owes its inclusion in the list to the conviction of
these philosophers that it is, like extension and form, fundamentally
important for mathematical Physics. The explanation of the
“secondary” qualities as subjective appears to go back to
Democritus.
77. See the further elaboration of this analogy in Bk. III. chap. 3, §
2 ff.
78. Professor Sidgwick’s defence of the Lockian view (Philosophy:
its Scope and Relations, p. 63 ff.) seems to me to ignore the point at
issue. namely, that in any sense in which “secondary” qualities get
their meaning from the content of sensation, primary qualities do the
same. The whole point is that the sensation is not merely (as
process) the occasion of our cognition of, e.g., hardness or softness,
but also (as content) furnishes the very meaning of “hard” or “soft.”
Cf. with what follows, Appearance and Reality, chap. 1.
79. The former alternative is that of scholasticism; in modern
science the latter has been more or less consciously adopted by
those thinkers who retain the notion of substances. The various
qualities are on this view consequences of the relations in which
each substance stands (a) to other interacting substances, and (b) in
particular to the unknown substratum of our “consciousness.”
80. See chaps. 1 and 2 of bk. i. of his Metaphysic.
 81. The reader who desires to study Kant’s doctrine in detail may
begin by taking up Kant’s own Prolegomena to the Study of any
future Metaphysic, which may be profitably consulted even by those
who find the Critique of Pure Reason too diffuse and technical. The
latest and cheapest translation is that included in the Open Court
Publishing Co.’s series of Philosophical Classics.
82. “Arbitrarily” because it is, as all recent psychology insists, the
direction of our attention which determines what qualities shall be
presented together, and thus become “associated.”
83. In Psychology this comes out in the rejection by the best
recent writers of the whole associationist account of the process of
perception, according to which the perception of a thing as a whole
was taken to mean the actual presence in sensation of one of its
qualities plus the reinstatement by association of the “ideas” of the
others. For the modern doctrine of the perception of a whole, as
distinct from the mere perception of its constituent parts, consult
Stout, Analytic Psychology, bk. i. chap. 3, or Manual of Psychology,3
bk. i. chap. 3.
84. This is just as true of the so-called primary qualities of things
as of any others. Thus the mass and again the kinetic energy of a
conservative material system are properly names for the way in
which the system will behave under determinate conditions, not of
modes of behaviour which are necessarily actually exhibited
throughout its existence. The laws of motion, again, are statements
of the same hypothetical kind about the way in which, as we believe,
particles move if certain conditions are fulfilled. The doctrine
according to which all events in the physical world are actual
motions, rests on no more than a metaphysical blunder of a
peculiarly barbarous kind. Cf. Stallo, Concepts and Theories of
Modern Physics, chaps. 10-12.
85. Thus, e.g., so fundamental a proposition in our current
mechanical science as the “first law of motion” is avowedly a
statement as to what would be the behaviour of things under a
condition which, so far as we know, is never actually realised. On the
thing as the “law of its states,” see Lotze, Metaphysic, I. 3. 32 ff.
(Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 88 ff.), and L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of
Knowledge, pp. 545-557.
 86. Mr. Hobhouse (op. cit., p. 541 ff.) thinks that the solution is
simply that those qualities belong to one “substance,” which are
apprehended together as occupying one space. As a working
criterion of what we mean by one bodily thing, this account seems
satisfactory, and has probably suggested itself spontaneously to
most of us. But it leaves untouched the more fundamental question
how the identification of a certain sight-space with a certain touch-
space is effected, and what are the motives which lead to it. Mr.
Hobhouse is content to take the identification as “given in adult
perception,” but it seems to me to emerge from his own good
account of the matter that it is the still more primitive apprehension of
my own body as a felt unity upon which the synthesis between sight
and touch spaces is based. If so, the ultimate source of the “unity of
substance” must be sought deeper than Mr. Hobhouse is willing to
go for it. And quaere, whether his account, if accepted as ultimate,
would not lead to the identification of substance with space? For the
difficulties which arise when you say the substance is the space and
its filling of qualities, see Appearance and Reality, chap. 2, pp. 19,
20 (1st ed.).
87. Monadology, §§ 8-16, 57-62.
88. This is true even where we merely count a number of
qualitatively equivalent units in order to ascertain their sum. It is their
positive character of being qualitatively equivalent which makes it
permissible in this case to take any one of them indifferently as first,
any other as second, etc. Whenever you apply the numerical series
to the arrangement in order of the qualitatively dissimilar, the nature
of your material as related to the character of your special interest in
it decides for you what you shall call first, second, third, etc.
89. As to the possibility of relations which are in this sense
external to their terms, see B. Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz, p.
130, and the articles by the same writer in Mind for January and July
1901.
90. See the elaborate discussion of the relational scheme implied
in any assertion of difference in Royce, The World and the Individual,
Second Series, lect 2.
91. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 3. Compare also
chap. 15, “Thought and Reality.”
 92. The reader who desires further knowledge of the researches in
the theory of Numbers upon which Prof. Royce’s doctrine is based,
may profitably consult Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die
Zahlen, and Couturat, L’Infini Mathématique.
93. Professor Royce’s own illustration of the map of England
executed upon a portion of the surface of the country is really a
typical instance of a self-contradictory purpose. He argues that such
a map, to be theoretically perfect, must contain a reduced facsimile
of itself as part of the country mapped, and this again another, and
so on indefinitely. But the whole force of the reasoning depends on
overlooking the distinction between the surface of England as it is
before the map is made, and the surface of England as altered by
the presence of the map. Prof. Royce assumes that you set out to
represent in the map a state of things which can in fact have no
existence until after the map is made. The previous existence of the
map at a certain spot is falsely taken to be one of the conditions to
which the map-maker is to conform in executing it. Every one of the
supposed “maps within the map” will thus involve distortion and
misrepresentation of the district it proposes to map. It is as if Hamlet
had chosen “Hamlet” as the subject of the “play within the play.” The
professor’s illustration thus does less than justice to his theory.
94. The fundamental defect in Professor Royce’s reasoning seems
to me to lie in the tacit transition from the notion of an infinite series
to that of an infinite completed sum. Thus he speaks of the series of
prime numbers as a “whole” being present at once to the mind of
God. But are the prime numbers, or any other infinite series, an
actual sum at all? They are surely not proved to be so by the
existence of general truths about any prime number.
95. See, e.g., Dedekind, op. cit., § 2: “It frequently happens that
different things a, b, c ... are apprehended upon whatsoever
occasion under a common point of view, mentally put together, and it
is then said that they form a system; the things a, b, c ... are named
the elements of the system”; and § 3 (definitions of whole and part).
96. Ante, Bk. II. chap. 2, § 5.
97. It is no answer to this view to urge that as soon as the intellect
undertakes to reflect upon and describe Reality it unavoidably does
so in relational terms. For it is our contention that the same intellect
which uses these relational methods sees why they are inadequate,
and to some extent at least how they are ultimately merged in a
higher type of experience. Thus the systematic use of the intellect in
Metaphysics itself leads to the conviction that the mere intellect is
not the whole of Reality. Or, in still more paradoxical language, the
highest truth for the mere intellect is the thought of Reality as an
ordered system. But all such order is based in the end on the
number-series with its category of whole and part, and cannot,
therefore, be a perfectly adequate representation of a supra-
relational Reality. Hence Truth, from its own nature, can never be
quite the same thing as Reality.
98. Or does Dr. Stout merely mean that there may be a hat and a
head, and also a relation of on and under (e.g., between the hat and
the peg), and yet my hat not be on my head? If this is his meaning, I
reply we have not really got the relation and its terms; if the hat is not
on the head, hat and head are not terms in the relation at all. I do not
see why, on his own principles, Dr. Stout should not add a fourth
factor to his analysis, namely, qualifiedness, or the fact that the
qualities are there, and so on indefinitely.
99. If you consider the lines a and α, as Dr. Stout prefers to do, I
should have thought two views possible. (a) There are not two lines
at all, but one, the “junction” at M being merely ideal. Then there
remains nothing to connect and there is no relation of “immediate
connection.” Or (b), the junction may be taken as real, and then you
have a perfectly ordinary case of relation, the terms being the
terminated lines a and α, and the relation being one of contact at M.
On every ground (a) seems to me the right view, but it is
incompatible with the reduction of continuity to “immediate
connection.” Thus the source of the difficulty is that (1) immediate
connection can only hold between the immediately successive terms
of a discontinuous series, and yet (2) cannot hold between them
precisely because they are discontinuous.
 CHAPTER V

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(2) CHANGE AND

CAUSALITY
§ 1. The conception of things as interacting leads to the two problems of Change
and Causality. The paradoxical character of change due to the fact that only
what is permanent can change. § 2. Change is succession within an identity;
this identity, like that of Substance, must be teleological, i.e. must be an
identity of plan or end pervading the process of change. § 3. Thus all change
falls under the logical category of Ground and Consequence, which becomes
in its application to succession in time the Principle of Sufficient Reason. § 4.
Causality. Cause—in the modern popular and scientific sense—means the
ground of a change when taken to be completely contained in preceding
changes. That every change has its complete ground in preceding changes is
neither an axiom nor an empirically ascertained truth, but a postulate
suggested by our practical needs. § 5. In the last resort the postulate cannot
be true; the dependence between events cannot be one-sided. The real
justification for our use of the postulate is its practical success. § 6. Origin of
the conception of Cause anthropomorphic § 7. Puzzles about Causation. (1)
Continuity. Causation must be continuous, and yet in a continuous process
there can be no distinction of cause from effect. Cause must be and yet
cannot be prior in time to effect. § 8. (2) The indefinite regress in causation. §
9. (3) Plurality of Causes. Plurality of Causes is ultimately a logical
contradiction, but in any form in which the causal postulate is of practical use
it must recognise plurality. §10. The “necessity” of the causal relation
psychological and subjective. §11. Immanent and Transeunt Causality:
Consistent Pluralism must deny transeunt Causation; but cannot do so
successfully, §12. Both transeunt and immanent Causality are ultimately
appearance.

§ 1. The fourth of the features which characterise the pre-scientific

view of the world we found to be the belief that things act and are
acted upon by one another. The problems to which this belief gives
rise are so vast, and have been historically of such significance for
Metaphysics, that they will require a separate chapter for their
discussion. In the conception of the interaction of things as it exists
for the naïve pre-scientific mind, we may distinguish at least two
aspects. There is (1) the belief that things change, that within the
unity of the one thing there is a succession of different states; and
(2) the belief that the changes of state of various things are so inter-
connected that the changes in one thing serve as occasions for
definite changes in other things. We thus have to discuss, first, the
general notion of change as an inseparable aspect of the being of
things, and next the concept of systematic inter-connection between
the changes of state of different things.
(a) Change. The problem presented by the apparently unceasing
mutability of existence is one of the earliest as well as one of the
most persistent in the whole range of Philosophy. In itself it might
seem that the successive presentation in time of various states is
neither more nor less noteworthy a feature of the world of experience
than the simultaneous presentation of a like variety, but the problem
of mutability has always appealed with special force to the human
imagination from its intimate connection with our personal hopes and
fears, ambitions and disappointments. Tempora mutantur, nos et
mutamur in illis; there is the secret of the persistence with which our
philosophic thought has from the first revolved round this special
problem. There, too, we may find a pregnant hint of the central
paradox implied in all mutability—namely, that only the identical and
permanent can change. It is because the self which changes with the
flux of time and circumstance is still in some measure the same old
self that we feel its changes to be so replete with matter for
exultation and despair. Were we completely new-made with each
successive change in our self, there would no longer be ground for
joy in transition to the better or grief at alteration for the worse.
The thought that only what is permanent can change has affected
Philosophy in different ways at different periods of its history. At the
very dawn of Greek Philosophy it was the guiding principle of the
Ionian physicists who sought to comprehend the apparent variety of
successive phenomena as the transformations of a single bodily
reality. As the difficulties inherent in such a materialistic Monism
became more apparent, the felt necessity of ascribing unity of some
kind to existence led Parmenides and his Eleatic successors to the
extreme view that change, being impossible in a permanent
homogeneous bodily reality, must be a mere illusion of our deceptive
senses. While yet again the later Ionian physicists, and their Sicilian
counterpart Empedocles, sought to reconcile the apparent mutability
of things with the criticism of Parmenides by the theory that what
appears to the senses as qualitative change is in reality the mere
regrouping in space of qualitatively unalterable “elements” or
“atoms”—μεῖξις διάλλαξίς τε μιγέντων.
At a more developed stage of Hellenic thought, the necessity of
taking some account of the mutability as well as of the permanence
of existence impelled Plato to draw the momentous distinction
between two worlds or orders of being—the real, with its eternal
unvarying self-identity, and the merely apparent, where all is change,
confusion, and instability. In spite of Plato’s manifest failure to make
it intelligible how these two orders, the eternal and the temporal, are
ultimately connected, this distinction in one form or another has
continued ever since to haunt all subsequent metaphysical
construction. Even our modern scientific Materialism, with its loudly
avowed scorn for all merely metaphysical questions, shows by its
constant endeavour to reduce all material existence to a succession
of changes in a homogeneous medium, both the persistence with
which the intellect demands a permanent background for change,
and the difficulty of finding logical satisfaction for the demand.
Yet there have not been wanting attempts to get rid of the paradox
by denying its truth. As the Eleatics sought to escape it by reducing
change itself to a baseless illusion, so some at least of the disciples
of Heracleitus seem to have evaded it by refusing to admit any
permanent identity in the changeable, and they have not been
entirely without imitators in the modern world. Incessant change
without underlying unity has had its defenders in the history of
Metaphysics, though they have not been numerous, and we must
therefore briefly consider what can be urged for and against such a
concept. Apart from the general difficulty of seeing how what
changes can at the same time be permanently identical with itself,
the only special argument in favour of the doctrine that only
incessant change is real seems to be the appeal to direct
experience. In any actual experience, it is contended, however
contracted its limits, we are always presented with the fact of change
and transition; we never apprehend an absolutely unchanging
content. Even where the object before us exhibits no succession,
self-examination will always detect at least alternating tension and
relaxation of attention with the accompanying fluctuations of bodily
sensation.
Now there can, of course, be no gainsaying these facts of
experience, but the conclusion based on them evidently goes much
further than the premisses warrant. If experience never gives us
mere persistence of an unchanging content, neither does it ever give
us mere change without persistence. What we actually experience
always exhibits the two aspects of identity and transition together.
Usually there will be, side by side with the elements which sensibly
change in the course of the experience, others which remain
sensibly constant throughout it. And even when, through inattention,
we fail to detect these constant elements, the successive states of
the changing content itself are not merely momentary; each has its
own sensible duration through which it retains its character without
perceptible changes. Experience thus entirely fails to substantiate
the notion of mere change apart from a background of permanent
identity.
The positive disproof of the notion must, however, be found in its
own inherent absurdity. Change by itself, apart from a background of
identity, is impossible for the reason that where there is no
underlying identity there is nothing to change. All change must be
change of and in some thing. A mere succession of entirely
disconnected contents held together by no common permanent
nature persisting in spite of the transition, would not be change at all.
If I simply have before me first A and then B, A and B being
absolutely devoid of any point of community, there is no sense in
saying that I have apprehended a process of change. The change
has been at most a change in myself as I passed from the state of
perceiving A to the state of perceiving B, and this subjective
transition again can only be called change on the assumption that
the I who am qualified first by the perception of A and its various
emotional and other accompaniments, and then by that of B and its
accompaniments, am the same. And where you have not merely a
change of perception but an actual perception of change, the case is
even clearer. What we perceive in such a case is “A changing into
B,” the two successive states A and B being held together by the fact
that they are successive states of some more permanent unity
[gamma]. Apart from the presence of this identical [gamma] in both
the earlier and later stages of the process, there would be no
meaning in speaking of it as one of change.
§ 2. Change, then, may be defined as succession within an
identity, the identity being as essential to the character of the
process as the succession. In what way, then, must we think of this
identity or common nature which is present throughout the whole
succession of changes? It should be clear that this question—how
that which changes can be permanent?—is simply our old problem
of quality and substance, how the many states can belong to one
thing, considered with special reference to the case of states which
form a succession in time. Thus, whatever is the true nature of the
unity to which the many states of one thing belong, will also be the
true nature of the identity which connects the successive stages of a
process of change.
Now we have already seen in what the unity to which the many
states belong must be taken to consist. We found that this unity is
essentially teleological; that group of states, we saw, is one thing
which functions as one in regard to an end or interest, or, as we may
also say, is the embodiment of coherent structure. The same is true
of the process of change. The earlier and later stages of the process
are differences in an identity precisely because they constitute one
process. And a process is one when it is the systematic realisation of
a single coherent end. To be one process means to be the
systematic expression in a succession of stages of a single coherent
plan or law. The succession of stages is thus welded into a unity by
the singleness of the plan or law which they embody, and it is this
systematic connection of each stage with all the rest which we
express by saying that whatever changes possesses an underlying
permanent identity of character. It would amount to precisely the
same thing if we said the successive states of anything that changes
form a connected system.
We must be careful here, as we were in dealing with the problem
of Substance, not to be misled by taking symbolic aids to imagination
for philosophical truths. Just as it is easy to imagine the “substance”
of things as a sort of material substratum, it is easy to imagine the
identity which pervades all changes as that of a number of pieces of
matter, and to think of the changes as constituted by their motion
through space. But such a representation must not be taken for
anything more than an aid to imagination. It helps us to make a
mental diagram, but it throws absolutely no light upon the real nature
of the connection between the identity and the succession. For the
same problem breaks out within each of the “self-identical” pieces of
matter; we have to say what we mean by calling it one and the same
throughout the series of its changing positions, and the necessity of
answering this question shows us at once that the identity of a
material particle throughout its motion is only one case of that
identity pervading succession which belongs to all change, and in no
sense affords any explanation of the principle it illustrates.[100] As a
recent writer puts it, “it seems to be a deeply rooted infirmity of the
human mind ... that it can hardly conceive activities of any sort apart
from material bases, ... through habitually seeking to represent all
phenomena in mechanical terms, in terms of the motion of little bits
of matter, many of us have come to believe that in so doing we
describe the actual events underlying phenomena.”[101] This “disease
of the intellect,” as the same writer aptly calls it, is nowhere more
insidious than where we are dealing with the problem of Change.
Change, then, involves two aspects. It is a succession of events in
time, and these events are connected by a systematic unity in such a
way that they form the expression of a plan or law of structure. The
series of successive states which make up the history of a thing are
the expression of the thing’s nature or structure. To understand the
thing’s structure is to possess the key to the succession of its states,
to know on what principle each gives way to its successor. And
similarly, to have complete insight into the nature or structure of
Reality as a whole would be to understand the principles according
to which every transitory event in the history of the Universe,
regarded as a series of events in time, is followed by its own special
successor.
It is evident that, in proportion as our knowledge of any thing or
system of things approaches this insight into the laws of its structure,
the processes of change acquire a new character for us. They lose
their appearance of paradox, and tend to become the self-evident
expression of the identity which is their underlying principle. Change,
once reduced to law and apprehended as the embodiment in
succession of a principle we understand, is no longer change as an
unintelligible mystery. We should bear this in mind when we reflect
on the doctrine of Plato that the physical world must be unreal
because the scene of incessant change. Such a view is only to be
understood by remembering that before the invention of the
mathematical methods which have enabled us with such
conspicuous success to reduce physical phenomena to orderly
sequence according to law, the physical world necessarily appeared
to the philosopher a scene of arbitrary change following no
recognisable principle. Change, so far as understood in the light of
its principle, has already ceased to be mere change.[102]
§ 3. Ground and Consequence. In the technical language of Logic,
the underlying principle of any system is called its Ground, the detail
in which the principle finds systematic expression is called its
Consequence. Ground and Consequence are thus one and the
same systematic whole, only considered from two different points of
view. The Ground is the pervading common nature of the system,
thought of as an identity pervading and determining the character of
its detail; the Consequence is the same system, looked at from the
point of view of the detail, as a plurality of differences pervaded and
determined by an identical principle. The understanding of a process
of change thus clearly consists in bringing it under the principle of
Ground and Consequence. In so far as we are successful in
detecting a principle in the apparently arbitrary succession of events,
these events become for us a system with a common principle of
structure for its Ground, and a plurality of successive states as its
Consequence.
Change is not, however, the only instance of the principle of
Ground and Consequence. These two aspects may also be found in
systematic wholes which contain no element of succession in time,
e.g. in a body of logical deductions from a few fundamental
premisses. The special peculiarity of the case of Change is that it is
the principle of Ground and Consequence as applied to a material
which is successive in time. As thus applied, the principle has
received the special name of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and
may be formulated thus: Nothing takes place unless there is a
sufficient reason why it should occur rather than not. It is clear that
such a proposition is a mere result of the application of the
conception of Reality as a systematic whole to the special case of
the existence of the successive in time. It is therefore simply one
case of the fundamental axiom of all knowledge, the axiom that what
truly exists is a coherent whole.[103] We must of course observe that
the principle does nothing to solve the perhaps insoluble problem
why succession in time should be a feature of experience. This is a
question which could only be answered if we could show that
succession in time is a logical consequence of the existence of any
multiplicity forming a systematic whole. Until we are able to establish
this result, we have simply to accept succession as a datum of our
experience. (Yet for some light upon the problem, see infra, Bk. III
chap. 4, § 9)
§ 4. Causality. So far we have said nothing of a concept which is
much more familiar in the popular treatment of the problem of
Change than that of Ground and Consequence, the concept of
Cause. In proceeding to discuss this concept, it is necessary in the
first place to explain which of the numerous senses of the word we
are taking for examination. There was an old scholastic distinction,
which still reappears occasionally in philosophical writings, between
the Causa cognoscendi, or reason for affirming a truth, and the
Causa existendi or fiendi, the cause of the occurrence of an event. It
is this latter meaning of the word “cause,” the meaning which is
predominant wherever the term is used in modern scientific
language, that we shall have in view in the following sections.
The Causa cognoscendi, or logical reason for the affirmation of a
truth, as distinguished from the psychological factors which lead a
particular individual to affirm it, is clearly identical with what modern
logicians call the Ground. A given proposition must logically be
affirmed as true in the last resort, because it fills a place in a wider
system of truths which no other proposition would fill. Thus, e.g., a
special proposition about the relation between the sides and angles
of a triangle is logically necessitated, because it is an integral
element in the development of a system of geometrical ideas which
repose as a whole upon certain fundamental assumptions as to the
character of spatial order. The original presuppositions cannot be
worked out to their logical consequence in a body of internally
coherent geometrical notions unless the proposition in question is
included in that body. And reciprocally, the logical justification for
regarding these presuppositions rather than any others as sound,
lies in the fact that they yield a body of internally consistent
consequences. Incidentally, we see by means of this illustration that
Ground and Consequence are mutually convertible, which is what
we might have inferred from the way in which we defined them as
mutually complementary aspects of a single systematic whole.
What we are concerned with in the everyday and scientific
treatment of Causation, is not this purely logical relation of Ground
and Consequence, but something partly identical with it, partly
different. The Causa fiendi has no significance except in connection
with occurrences or events in time, and may roughly be said to
correspond with what Aristotle denotes the “Source of Change”—
ἀρχὴ κινήσεως or ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις—and his mediæval followers
named the Efficient Cause. Cause, in the popular sense of the word,
denotes the attempt to carry out the principle of the interconnection
of events in a system along special lines by regarding every event as
completely determined by conditions which are themselves previous
events. Widely as the popular and the scientific uses of the term
“cause” diverge in minor respects, they agree in the essential point.
That every event has its cause is understood, both in everyday life
and in the sciences which use the concept of causation, to mean that
the occurrence and the character of every event in the time-series is
completely determined by preceding events. In more technical
language, causation for everyday thought and for the sciences
means one-sided dependence of the present on the past, and the
future on the present.
It is, of course, obvious that the principle of Causation as thus
understood is not a necessary logical deduction from the principle of
Ground and Consequence. It might be the case that all occurrences
form a coherent plan or system, such that if you once grasped the
principle of the system you could infer from it what precise
occurrence must take place at any one moment, and yet it might be
impossible to discover this principle by an examination of the course
of events up to the present moment. In other words, the principle of
the systematic interconnection of events might be valid, and yet the
events of the present might depend on those which will succeed
them in the future no less than on those which have preceded them
in the past. In that case it would be impossible with absolute logical
certainty to infer what will occur at a given moment from the mere
examination of what has preceded, i.e. the principle of Causation as
used in the sciences would not be logically valid.[104]
Cause, as currently understood, is thus identical not with the
whole true logical ground, but with the ground so far as it can be
discovered in the train of temporally antecedent circumstances, i.e.
cause is incomplete ground. This point is important, as it shows that
the principle of Causation is not, like the principle of Sufficient
Reason, axiomatic. It is no necessary logical consequence of the
knowability or systematic character of the Real that an event should
be completely determined by temporally antecedent events; for
anything that is implied in the systematic character of the Real, the
event may be equally dependent on subsequent occurrences. Again,
the principle of Causation cannot be empirically established by an
appeal to the actual course of experience. Actual experience is
certainly not sufficient to show that every event is absolutely
determined by its antecedent conditions; at most the success of our
scientific hypotheses based upon the assumption of causality only
avails to show that events may be inferred from their antecedents
with sufficient accuracy to make the causal assumption practically
useful.
Regarded as a universal principle of scientific procedure, the
causal assumption must be pronounced to be neither an axiom nor
an empirical truth but a postulate, in the strict sense of the word, i.e.
an assumption which cannot be logically justified, but is made
because of its practical value, and depends upon the success with
which it can be applied for confirmation. In the sense that it is a
postulate which experience may confirm but cannot prove, it may
properly be said to be a priori, but it is manifestly not a priori in the
more familiar Kantian sense of the word. That is, it is not a
necessary and indispensable axiom without which systematic
knowledge would be impossible. For, as we have already seen and
shall see more fully in the immediate sequel, it may not be, and
indeed in the last resort cannot be, true.
§ 5. This last statement will possibly appear startling to the reader
who is unacquainted with the history of metaphysical investigations
into Causality. But it is easy to show that it is really the expression of
an obvious truth. For the causal principle, as we have just seen, is
an imperfect expression of the really axiomatic principle of Sufficient
Reason or Ground and Consequence. And it is readily seen that the
expression it gives to that principle, because imperfect, must be
partially false. What the principle of Ground and Consequence says
is, that the whole of existence is a single coherent system in which
every part is determined by the nature of the whole as revealed in
the complete system. But if this is true, each constituent of the
system can only be completely determined by its connections with all
the rest. No constituent can be entirely determined by its relations to
a lesser part of the whole system, in the way presupposed by the
notion of one-sided causal dependence. The “cause” must, if the
principle of Ground and Consequence be valid, be determined by the
“effect” no less than the “effect” by the “cause.” And therefore the
causal postulate cannot be the whole truth.
How this fatal logical defect in the principle of Causation makes
itself felt in the logic of the inductive sciences, and how logicians
have sought without success to avoid it, we shall incidentally see as
our discussion proceeds. At present we must be content to note that,
owing to this flaw, Causation, wherever it is asserted, can only be
Appearance and never complete Reality, and that no science which
works with the concepts of cause and effect can give us the highest
truth. Of course, the logical defects of the concept need not impair its
practical usefulness. Though it can never, for the reason given
already, be ultimately true that any event is absolutely determined by
antecedent events, the assumption may be sufficiently near the truth
to yield useful deductions as to the course of occurrences, precisely
as a mathematical approximation to the value of a surd quantity may,
without being the exact truth, be close enough for practical use. Also,
it might well be the case that the causal postulate approximates
more nearly to the truth in some spheres of investigation than in
others, a consideration which is not without its bearing on the ethical
problems of freedom and responsibility.
If we ask how the causal postulate, being as it must be only
imperfectly true, comes to be made, the answer is obvious. The
whole conception is anthropomorphic in origin, and owes its
existence to our practical needs. To take the latter point first, logically
there is no better reason for treating an event as determined solely
by antecedents, than for treating it as solely determined by
subsequent events. Yet when the latter supposition is made, as it is
by all believers in omens and presages, we all agree to condemn it
as superstitious. Why is this? Two reasons may be assigned. (a)
Even granting that an event may be determined by subsequent
events, yet, as we do not know what these events are until after their
occurrence, we should have no means of inferring by what particular
events yet to come any present event was conditioned, and thus
should be thrown back upon mere unprincipled guess-work if we
attempted to assign its, as yet future, conditions.
(b) A more important consideration is that our search for causes is
ultimately derived from the search for means to the practical
realisation of results in which we are interested. We desire to know
the conditions of occurrences primarily, in order to produce those
occurrences for ourselves by setting up their conditions. It is
therefore essential to us for our practical purposes to seek the
conditions of an occurrence exclusively among its antecedents, and
the causal postulate which asserts that the complete conditions of
the event are comprised somewhere in the series of antecedent
events is thus the intellectual expression of the demand made by our
practical needs upon Reality. We postulate it because, unless the
postulate is approximately realised, we cannot intervene with
success in the course of events. We refuse, except as a pure
speculation, to entertain the notion that an event may be determined
by subsequent as well as by antecedent events, because that notion
leads to no practical rules for operation upon our environment.
§ 6. As might be expected of a postulate so obviously originated
by our practical needs, the concept of cause on examination reveals
its anthropomorphic character. This is particularly obvious when we
consider the concept of Causation as it figures in everyday
unscientific thought. The various scientific substitutes for the popular
notion of cause all exhibit traces of the endeavour to purge the
conception of its more anthropomorphic elements. In the popular use
of the concept this anthropomorphism comes out most strikingly in
two ways. (a) A cause, as popularly conceived, is always a person or
thing, i.e. something we can imagine as a whole, and into which we
can mentally project a conscious life akin to our own. To the scientific
mind it seems obvious that causes and effects are alike events and
events only, but for popular thought, while the effect is always a
quality or state (e.g., death, fever, etc.), the cause is regularly a thing
or person (the bullet, the poison, the tropical sun, etc.).
(b) Closely connected with this is the emphasis popular thought
lays upon what it calls the activity of the cause. The cause is never
thought of as merely preceding the effect as an “inseparable
antecedent”; it is supposed to make the effect occur, to bring it about
by an exercise of activity. According to the most coherent expositions
of this type of thought, in causation one thing is always active in
producing a change in another thing which is passive. The origin of
this notion is sufficiently obvious. As all philosophers since Hume
have recognised, the “activity” of the cause results from the
ascription to it of the characteristic feeling of self-assertion and self-
expansion which accompanies our own voluntary interference in the
course of events. Similarly, the “passivity” of the thing in which the
effect is produced is only another name for the feeling of coercion
and thwarted self-assertion which arises in us when the course of
nature or the behaviour of our fellows represses our voluntary
execution of our designs.
Science, in its attempt to extend the concept of causal
determination over the whole domain of existence, has naturally felt
these anthropomorphic implications as obstacles. From the effort to
expel them arises what we may call the common scientific view of
causation, as ordinarily adopted for the purposes of experimental
investigation and formulated in the works of inductive logicians. The
concept of a thing, except as the mode of interconnection of states,
being unnecessary for the sciences which aim simply at the
reduction of the sequence of occurrences to order, the notion of
causation as a transaction between two things is replaced in the
experimental sciences by the conception of it as merely the
determination of an event by antecedent events. Similarly, with the
disappearance of things as the vehicles of causal processes falls the
whole distinction between an active and a passive factor. As it
becomes more and more apparent that the antecedent events which
condition an occurrence are a complex plurality and include states of
what is popularly called the thing acted upon as well as processes in
the so-called agent, science substitutes for the distinction between
agent and patient the concept of a system of reciprocally dependent
interacting factors. These two substitutions give us the current
scientific conception of a cause as the “totality of the conditions” in
the presence of which an event occurs, and in the absence of any
member of which it does not occur. More briefly, causation in the
current scientific sense means sequence under definitely known
conditions.
Indispensable as this notion of the determination of every event by
a definite collection of antecedents and by nothing else is for
practice, regarded as a logical formulation of the principle of the
systematic unity of existence, it is open to grave objections, most of
which will be found to have made themselves felt in the logic of the
inductive sciences quite independently of conscious metaphysical
analysis. In dealing with these difficulties, we shall find that their
general effect is to place us in the following dilemma. If we wish to
state the causal principle in such a way as to avoid manifest
speculative falsehood, we find that it has to be modified until it
becomes identical with the principle of Ground and Consequence in
its most universal form, but as thus modified it is no longer of any
service for the purposes of the experimental sciences. You seem
driven to take it either in a form in which it is true but practically
useless, or in one in which it is useful but not true. To illustrate the
way in which this dilemma arises, we may examine three of the main
problems which have actually been created by the scientific use of
the principle,—(a) the puzzle of continuity; (b) the puzzle of the
indefinite regress, (c) the puzzle of the plurality of causes.
§ 7. (a) The Puzzle of Continuity. Continuity is, strictly speaking, a
property of certain series, and may be defined for purposes of
reference much as follows. A series is continuous when any term