Causality

“ In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it always arises from two things, a belief that causality must be exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we take an activity-situation at its face-value, it seems as if we caught in flagrante delicto the very power that makes facts come and be. ”

“ The most important of these is the Principle of Causality, which has been enunciated in a variety of ways: Whatever happens has a cause; Whatever begins to be has a cause; Whatever is contingent has a cause; Nothing occurs without a cause. ”

“ The opposite—the absurd—notion that the principle of causality is abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately to nothing else than an infinite regress—an eternal succession of causes and effects. ”

“ If the "law of causality" is to be something actually discoverable in the practice of science, the above proposition has a better right to the name than any "law of causality" to be found in the books of philosophers. ”

“ Let us then assume that such a causality of life through its immediate being is checked: what will then arise in the checked life? That causality, in so far as it is in the life, can surely not be annihilated itself; only its manifestation can be checked; that causality or determined activity and freedom remains in the life, but in a manner as a causality which has no causality. ”

“ The principle of causality, for example,—what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. ”

“ In human intelligence, as it is now developed, universal and necessary principles are offered to us under forms in some sort consecrated. The principle of causality, for example, is thus enounced to us:—Every thing that begins to appear necessarily has a cause. ”

“ We reply that while the absolutely independent causality of the First Cause is essentially Divine, another kind or order of causality, dependent on the former, but none the less real, can be and is communicated to creatures. ”

“ And endless illustrations of such a perception of causality might be drawn from the everyday life of civilized man: indeed, how seldom does any one of us wait to construct a general proposition about causality in the abstract before we act on our practical knowledge of it. ”

“ The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. ”

“ For, if the primitive, popular conception tends to restrict the cause to the antecedent, to that which acts, a little reflexion will show us that the cause is only determined as such by its effect, that the two terms are correlative, the one not existing without the other. Finally, with more profound reflexion, the process itself, the transition, the passage, the nexus between antecedent and consequent, appears as the vital point, the proprium quid of causality. ”

“ But the principle of causality applies to a real series, and not to a double one. The power of the cause goes over into an Other opposed to it, and produces therein a Being, and nothing further; a Being for a possible outside Intelligence, but not for the thing itself. ”

“ But give to the human mind the principle of causality, admit that every sensation, as well as every phenomenon, every change, every event, has a cause, as evidently we are not the cause of certain sensations, and that especially these sensations must have a cause, and we are naturally led to recognize for those sensations causes different from ourselves, and that is the first notion of an exterior world. ”

“ And wherever the seat of real causality is, as ultimately known ‘for true’ (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt) , a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other nature of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we mean by working, though we may later come to learn that working was not exactly there. ”

“ We have also been prated to about a moral sense born within us, and this, too, by physical science—by the science that founds its whole procedure upon the law of causality, as if this law did not obliterate the very life of duty, and render it an unmeaning word. ”

“ They are in principle attempts to get rid of all transeunt causality, and have been discussed in their general bearings in our chapter on the Causal Postulate, where we satisfied ourselves that any science which recognises, as Psychology has to do, the existence of finite things must also admit the principle of transeunt causality, at any rate as a working hypothesis. ”

“ In other words, the very conception of the principle of causality implies a thinking substance wherein that conception arises, and therefore, as a mere matter of formal statement, it is impossible to assign logical priority to this conception over the thing whereby it is conceived. ”

“ In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.
These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,—enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. ”

“ Historically, our original model for constructing the conception of cause is our immediate experience in moving our limbs, on the basis of which the far-famed ‘necessary connection’—which at bottom is only the conceptual translation of the feeling of ‘having to’—is postulated. This primitive conception of causation, however, does not prove adequate for all our later purposes, especially when, as is usually the case, it is misunderstood and mismanaged. So we proceed to other formulations of causality, which, however, are no less clearly dependent on our experiences and relative to our purposes. ”

“ And that the ultimate Reality is either mental, or something greater, seems to be proved by the consideration that if it be supposed anything less, there must be an end of the conception of equivalency as between cause and effect, and so of the conception of causality itself ”

“ As soon as the impulse to have causality exists and continues, there arises in consciousness a desire to form the just described conception of a possible causality to produce a certain end from the contemplation of the faculty in general. ”

“ There is just one other consideration which at first sight appears to favour the “transference” theory of causality, but which on analysis shows how illusory the proffered explanation is, and how unintelligible the simplest phenomenon of change must be to those who fail to grasp the profound significance of the principle that all real being which is subject to change must of necessity be partly potential and partly actual. ”

“ But since our concept of efficient causality has its origin in our internal experience of our own selves as active agents, as causing some portion of what enters into our experience, the test seems to assume that we have already introduced into this experience a real distinction between the self and what is caused by the self. ”

“ The causality which relates to purely possible effects can only be understood by placing it in an intelligence. The cause which does not produce an effect, but which may produce it, involves a relation of the existent to the non-existent; the cause exists, the effect does not exist; the cause does not produce it, but may produce it; what is the relation of that which exists to that which does not exist? is not a relation without a term to which it relates, a contradiction? ”

“ The presence of a final cause is what makes them free, and the presence of efficiency in that cause, at the same time, brings the volition under the general law of causality, but with the limitation, due to the fact that the motive is a final cause also, that the causality is subjective or internal, and not objective or external. ”

“ But, as a consequence of that law of natural causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of numerous concurrent causes and not of one cause alone, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this true idea. ”

“ The question is too complex to be resolved thus. The principle of causality has been understood differently in different times and places; in a single society, it varies with the social environment and the kingdoms of nature to which it is applied. ”

“ All such views seem to depend upon assuming some unduly simplified law of causality; for, in any legitimate sense of "cause" and "effect," science seems to show that they are usually very widely dissimilar, the "cause" being, in fact, two states of the whole universe, and the "effect" some particular event.
(2) "Cause is analogous to volition, since there must be an intelligible nexus between cause and effect." This maxim is, I think, often unconsciously in the imaginations of philosophers who would reject it when explicitly stated. ”

“ This is so because we conceive the effect as being produced or actualized through the operative influence of the cause, and with real dependence on this latter; and it is inconceivable that a cause should have power to actualize other being, distinct from itself, which would be of a higher grade of excellence than itself. The nature of efficient causality, of the influence by which the cause is related to its effect, is not easy to determine ”

“ There are indeed many philosophers and scientists who seem to believe that there is such a local transference of some actuality from cause to effect, that efficient causality is explained by it, and cannot be intelligibly explained otherwise. ”

“ Causation is deeply embedded in language and common sense. We say that people build houses or make roads: to “build” and to “make” are both notions involving causality. We say that a man is “powerful”, meaning that his volitions are causes over a wide range. ”

“ But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them. ”

“ The causation whereby I explain the data of experience is itself a transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the transcendent objects which cause experience in us.” Hereupon, however, one asks, at the present stage: What, then, leads you to believe in the existence of that transcendent sort of causation? The realist hereupon may reply: “Why, some of the data of consciousness are such as demand, as their sufficient cause, the existence of just such transcendent causality. ”

“ The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy itself—Ἀδύνατον γίνεσθαι τι ἐκ μηδενὸς προυπάρχοντος— [Pg 23] pointed to an Ἀρχή—a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change—and thus pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle of causality. ”

“ Everything in the universe is struggling for liberty. When I am bound by nature, by name and form, by time, space and causality, I do not know what I truly am. But even in this bondage my real Self is not completely lost. I strain against the bonds; one by one they break, and I become conscious of my innate grandeur. Then comes complete liberation. I attain to the clearest and fullest consciousness of myself -- i know that I am the infinite spirit, the master of nature, not its slave. Beyond all differentiation and combination, beyond space, time and causation, I am that I am. ”

“ The conditions of every causation are multifarious as we look at them in a regressus of causes or a progressus of effects, and as the mind of the individual can make but one judgment at a time, it may be that the one of the causes or effects which is considered, is in fact a trivial element in the causation, for in all our language we are accustomed to speak of one of the causes as the special cause, for it must be the special one in consideration. ”

“ I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a ‘category,’ if you like, of reality, is just what we feel it to be, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the healthy thing [Pg 186] for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist. ”

“ Causes, properly so called, belong to the sphere of necessity, blind, and not yet laid bare. The cause therefore appears as passing into its correlative, and losing its primordiality there by sinking into dependency. It is only by implication, or for us, that the cause is in the effect made for the first time a cause, and that it there returns into itself. The End, on the other hand, is expressly stated as containing the specific character in its own self,—the effect, namely, which in the purely causal relation is never free from otherness. ”

“ Fallacies of cause occur in every hour of waking life. We attribute effects to wrong causes. We are especially liable to this from the fact that both cause and effect are conditions, and causation is a change of condition from an antecedent to a consequent. ”

“ The notion of causation is deemed, by the schools of metaphysics most in vogue at the present moment, to imply a mysterious and most powerful tie, such as can not, or at least does not, exist between any physical fact and that other physical fact on which it is invariably consequent, and which is popularly termed its cause: and thence is deduced the supposed necessity of ascending higher, into the essences and inherent constitution of things, to find the true cause, the cause which is not only followed by, but actually produces, the effect. ”