Natural causality

“ 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. ”

“ IN the following paper I wish, first, to maintain that the word "cause" is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable; secondly, to inquire what principle, if any, is employed in science in place of the supposed "law of causality" which philosophers imagine to be employed; thirdly, to exhibit certain confusions, especially in regard to teleology and determinism, which appear to me to be connected with erroneous notions as to causality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Let us re-state the principle of causality as a universal and necessary law of thought. "All phenomena present themselves to us as the expression of POWER, and refer us to a causal ground whence they issue." ”

“ 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. ”

“ On this assumption of a sense of sensations, but not of causality, he deduces that we could not from such data infer any particular kind of cause, or a bodily cause, e.g. a tree, or indeed any cause at all, or any event beyond perception, without assuming the principle of causation that Nature is uniform in cause and effect over great intervals of time and space. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a matter of fact, science has robbed the concept causality of all meaning, and has reserved it merely as an allegorical formula, which has made it a matter of indifference whether cause or effect be put on this side or on that. ”

“ Surely, in the very act of making the distinction between succession and causality, in the very act of denying that we can discover any causal connexion between one physical phenomenon and another, we imply that we have got the idea of Causality in our minds; and that, however little we may have discovered a genuine cause, we could not believe that anything could happen without a cause. ”

“ Whether all processes be really ascribable to such causes, whether, in other words, nature be completely intelligible, or whether there be changes which would elude the law of a necessary causality, and fall into a realm of spontaneity or freedom, is not here the place to determine ”

“ Causality in its mere mechanical relations may be considered for convenience, and translated as, ‘mechanical law:’ contemplated in its relation to a living organism, we may render it by such an expression as a ‘law of life’. But carry causality to its spring, trace it back to consciousness and thought, and it admits of no disguise; it is power, it is volition ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who admit the principle of causality, say it is effected by the action of B, which they call the cause. If it is a substance which is produced, they suppose the intervention of an infinite power. But those who deny the principle of causality can only answer that the transition from not-A to A is made absolutely. They imagine the instant M, in which A did not exist; and then the instant N, in which A exists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have a fertility as [Pg 671] ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to recast the world of sense until its lines become more congruent with theirs. Take for example the principle that 'nothing can happen without a cause.' We have no definite idea of what we mean by cause, or of what causality consists in. But the principle expresses a demand for some deeper sort of inward connection between phenomena than their merely habitual time-sequence seems to us to be. The word 'cause' is, in short, an altar to an unknown god ”

“ But this natural probability is converted into certainty, when we take into consideration that universal law of our experience which is termed the law of Causation, and which makes us mentally connect with the beginning of everything, some antecedent condition, or Cause. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The Reason being only the action of the two great laws of causality and substance refers sensation to an external cause, a force called matter: and the interior action to an internal cause or the I. But these two causes, viz. the external and internal, nature and man, must have their cause, for the law of causality forces us to seek an existence beyond which no other is to be thought. Now, nature and man being two, neither of them can be the first cause or the absolute. As the first cause is the only substance, it follows that nature, man, and God, are one.—p. ”

“ At the threshold of this inquiry we are met by an objection, which, if not removed, would be fatal to the attempt to treat human conduct as a subject of science. Are the actions of human beings, like all other natural events, subject to invariable laws? Does that constancy of causation, which is the foundation of every scientific theory of successive phenomena, really obtain among them? ”

“ I conceive it to be necessary, when the hypothesis relates to causation, that the supposed cause should not only be a real phenomenon, something actually existing in nature, but should be already known to exercise, or at least to be capable of exercising, an influence of some sort over the effect. ”

“ All minds [he tells us] [43] with any instincts of science in their composition have grown to distrust, on merely antecedent grounds, any explanation which embodies a miraculous element. Such minds have grown to regard{30} all these explanations as mere expressions of our own ignorance of natural causation; or, in other words, they have come to regard it as an à priori truth that nature is always uniform in respect of method or causation; that the reign of law is universal; the principle of continuity ubiquitous. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ For it is the essence of a scientific definition to be causative, not by introduction of imaginary somewhats, natural or supernatural under the name of causes, but by announcing the law of action in the particular case, in subordination to the common law of which all the phenomena are modifications or results. ”

“ Next to consistency, the great principle of causation constitutes the most essential part of all natural truth, and to deny the operation of this principle in particular cases of mental action, simply because we, with our very finite powers, cannot in the extremely imperfect state of our knowledge, yet fully explain some of the most difficult, complex, transient, and ever-changing phenomena of will and consciousness, is contrary to the most weighty evidence. ”

“ Whether the cause and its effect be necessarily successive or not, causation is still the law of the succession of phenomena. Everything which begins to exist must have a cause; what does not begin to exist does not need a cause; what causation has to account for is the origin of phenomena, and all the successions of phenomena must be resolvable into causation. These are the axioms of our doctrine. If these be granted, we can afford, though I see no necessity for doing so, to drop the words antecedent and consequent as applied to cause and effect. ”

“ 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. ”