XXVII—CAUSATION
Causation differs from all other categories in that one of its elements is mental. It is a series beginning in the mind—in this relation denominated cause—and developing into objective phenomena called effects or an effect. The series being known by judgment we can infer similar causes from perception of similar effects. The commonest causation is the use and interpretation of language. Because we utter words from a certain motive we infer that all who utter the same words do so from the same motive. That is the reason of the intelligibility of words.
This category is peculiar from the extremely narrow range of the experience which supplies the judgments. We never perceive any mind but one—our own—and this has to supply all the judgments by which we reason concerning other minds. There is therefore no category in which correct reasoning is so difficult and so rare. No amount of experience entirely overcomes this defect, for if we are ignorant we cannot understand the wise, and if we are wise we cannot conceive the motives of the ignorant and vicious. Only those persons who are mentally very like each other are mutually comprehensible.
This category has a further peculiarity. In all the rest the inference relates to objective experience, and this being due to interaction of minds we are justified in saying that until it is perceived it has no existence. But in causation we are inferring something with reference to a mind, and this exists though we never can perceive it. We know that minds exist without perception because we know that our own exists though no one perceives us—though we are in total darkness and silence and cannot ourselves perceive our bodies. As already stated, Existence has not the same meaning when applied to objects and to minds, objects being merely temporary conditions of minds. The non-existence of inferred but unperceived objects does not follow from any defect in the faculty of inference, but depends on the essential character of objects. They are created by mutual contact of minds and cannot exist without that condition, however clearly they may be inferred and however correctly their appearance may be predicted.
Causation is confounded with sequence because both are series. Let me illustrate the difference between them by an example. I turn the stop-cock of a pipe, and water flows from the open end of the pipe. In popular and even scientific language it would be said that I caused the water to flow. But this is incorrect. All I caused was the turning of the tap; that alone was wholly due to my energy and intelligence. There followed as a sequence the outflow of water, but that was due partly to cosmic force and partly to the previous human causation (not mine) implied in making and laying down the pipe so as to utilise the cosmic force. I merely removed an obstacle that prevented the further development of the force in a particular direction. My relation to the outflow was sequence, not causation.
In observation sequence registers fixed or probable series of objects without regard to their causes. It is sufficient if they occur regularly enough to justify prediction. Causation, on the other hand, pays no regard to physical connection of any sort, but seeks out the being or beings who supplied the energy producing an effect or series of effects. The speculations in causation pass quite beyond the domain of objectivity, over into the realm of true creation.
When we read that 'the succession of events is an endless chain of effects which are in their turn causes of new effects,' what is meant is sequence, and for 'cause' and 'effect' the terms 'antecedent' and 'consequent' should have been employed. Sequences may be 'chains' and may be long, but if so their links have been forged by independent causes acting across the chain; as when a line of soldiers fire in succession at regular intervals, or as in the case of the moon's quarters. In these instances the objects, although forming a series, has each a cause of its own.
Certainly a causation is a series, for the cause precedes the effect. But an effect is never the cause of a succeeding effect. When this appears to be the case the explanation is that the energy was not exhausted in producing the immediate simple effect, but has produced a complicated effect in which a series may be discovered. An objective effect, being a mere flash of consciousness—a shadow on a window-blind—is incapable of causing anything.
Analysis of Cause. Cause is mind in action. It consists of at least energy and a sentimental motive—energy exerted to gratify sentiment. If the mind is intellectualised there will probably be an ideal element in the cause—in this connection called plan or design—for the better direction of the energy. Normal human causation consists of an effort of mind directed towards the objective realisation of a plan, for the gratification of a sentiment. This is the same as WILL.
All three elements of cause may be furnished by the same individual—or any two of them—or only one. For instance, the man who wants a house supplies the motive, the architect provides the design, the builder finds the energy.
One plan may use up an indefinite number of separate stores of energy. Even in an individual the realisation of a plan exhausts the powers of millions of organic cells. A military campaign illustrates the relation of plan to power. The design may have been formed by one man, and then communicated wholly or partially to a hundred thousand, and the energies of these may be devoted to its realisation. The soldier fights with his own energy, but he is directed by his commander's idea, or so much of it as has been confided to him. The design may stretch from the commander to the soldier, but not the energy. In order that the commander should be termed the 'cause' of his private's activity, it would be necessary to eliminate the notion of exerted energy from causation, and reduce it to bare communication of design, which would be absurd.
The stretching of one design over many relays of energy has no doubt helped to confirm the notion that causation is a long chain of alternate causes and effects. The truth is that energy can act only at short range, and has to be incessantly renewed. The world is in a constant state of creation and dissolution, say the Kabbalists. It is absurd to speak of anything that existed a thousand or even a hundred years ago as the cause of anything existing to-day. The design may intellectually survive, but the energy is long since dissipated. We have never more than about a day's supply of energy in store at once.
If sentiment, power, and design are supplied by different individuals, no single one of them can be called the cause of the effect. The relation of each to the result is sequence. When we have traced an effect to the mind or minds that supplied the three or the two necessary elements—supposing the design is sometimes omitted and the act what we call instinctive—we have obtained a complete explanation of the effect. Our curiosity is then absolutely satisfied. We have reached a true beginning.
It is the want of this thorough explanation that renders material science so disappointing. We are put off with a mere physical antecedent, which itself needs explanation as much as its consequent. It does not make the antecedent more significant to place it far back in time, for time by itself is not a cause—it is merely a name given to intervals of experience. A thing is never truly explained until we see that its production either caused pleasure to something else, or was expected to cause pleasure. Behind everything must be Sentiment.
One generation of beings is not the cause of the following generation, else the former would have perished in begetting the latter. More particularly, a man is not the effect of his parents or remoter ancestors, though they stood to him in an antecedent relation. The seed of his body was taken from theirs, but his energy is his own, drawn direct from the universal source. If he resembles them corporeally it is because he previously resembled them mentally, not because the cells of his body have hereditary tendencies to take particular forms. Hence the Darwinian genealogy of men and animals—supposing it were correct—does not explain them. It is a phenomenal schematism based on or implying an erroneous assumption—that generation is causation.
Atomism—the theory of Democritus—is founded on another false view of causation. The physical parts of a thing are conceived to be the causes of the thing, and so the least conceivable particles of 'matter' are considered the first causes and true explanation of all things. This notion appears to be useful in chemistry, but it cannot be accepted as philosophy. If our senses were sharpened to perceive atoms these would simply be small phenomena, and it would still be necessary to inquire what motive and power produced them. It has been suggested that atoms may be inherently sentient and dynamic: if so they are minute animals or cells, and we are still without an explanation of their occurrence in organised masses. It is inconceivable that they should spontaneously enter into intricate combinations, whose evident purpose has only an indirect and partial bearing on their welfare.
Though advocated by men of undoubted ability, Atomism and Evolution are nothing more than forms of the ordinary realistic belief, that things are caused by their physical antecedents. The two theories are supposed to be complementary, but in reality they are contradictory. If an animal body is caused by its parents it cannot be caused by its own atoms, and vice versâ.
Varieties of Causation. Abstract causation—the category—consists of a cause and an effect. The former, as we have seen, is complicated, the latter may comprise several objects. Ignoring the complications involved in the use of an organism—which comes between the mind and the final effect—we distinguish four or five varieties of causation.
The cause C produces from its own energy the series of effects e1—e4, like the rebounding of a missile from the surface of ground or water. This may be called 'ricochet.'
Effects, each having an independent cause, sometimes form a series like a ladder:
This is the species illustrated by a successive discharge of musketry. The causation of science consists of the effects in this species considered apart from the causes.
In the 'gamut' the effects are in sequence, but they have all the same physical antecedent.
The successive acts of the same man or animal are of this kind.
In each of these species the effects are in series and may be treated as a sequence, but the cause or causes lie outside the sequence. Far from mere regularity of succession being a proof of causation between the objects, it may very easily be itself a part of the causal design.
In the 'capstan' several partial causes contribute to produce one effect, as when a gang of men manipulate one engine.
The 'star' or 'fountain' is the converse of the last. A single cause produces several simultaneous partial effects, as when we strike our open hand smartly on the surface of water.
These sub-categories enable us, if we so wish, to define an energic series somewhat more precisely than by calling it a causation in the most abstract sense. Possibly also the figures delineated represent the primitive forms which energy takes when emerging into the phenomenal. The 'star' is a most characteristic form. The dendritic shape so frequently met with in objects is a star springing from a ray of a preceding star. Perhaps each vegetable bud has an independent cause; if not they are 'ricochets' from the general plant life. In the combinations of these elementary effects we have a likely explanation of plant and crystal formation.
'Conservation' of Energy. Energy is annihilated in the using. It emanates from a great universal centre, and at a short distance from that centre is completely and irrecoverably dissipated. The apparent fixity of things is purely formal—like the fixity of a water-fall, which renews its substance every few seconds. That is the meaning of saying that the world is in a constant state of formation and dissolution.
Physical theorists represent energy under the figure of substance, but they suppose it is fixed in quantity though constantly undergoing change of form—the scientific view, here as elsewhere, being just the opposite of the philosophical.
Observe—say the conservationists—the case of a man raising a heavy stone from the earth. He fatigues himself but he does not destroy energy; he acquires command over the energy-in-position of the stone, and in using it to crack a cocoa-nut or drive a post he receives back his own energy undiminished in quantity.
That seems reasonable at first sight. A quantity of energy is taken from the man and put into the stone; it is taken from the stone and put into the driven post. To be sure, if the man undrives the post he does not thereby disfatigue himself, as the theory would lead us to expect—he fatigues himself the more.
The same 'law,' we are told, holds good in building a dam across a stream and utilising the force of water to drive a mill. The energy apparently lost in the construction is recovered in the superior ease with which we grind our corn or saw our timber. There is a confusion in the terminology here: to save energy that would otherwise be lost is not identical with recovering energy that has once been used.
We make a gun, load it, and discharge a bullet against a target. What has become of the force expended? It has been transformed into heat, say the conservationists. And when the target and flattened bullet have cooled down? The energy has gone to raise the general temperature of the universe!
That is a conclusion hard to believe and impossible to verify. But—granting that the individual explosions of a gun may be the 'conservation' of some antecedent power—how do we recover the initial expense of the instrument? And if not recoverable, where at least and in what form does it exist? Prior to the explosions that are represented by heated targets and the like, energy was spent in inventing and making the gun, making the ammunition, loading and aiming the piece. All these were essential to the effect—and what has become of them? Have they also gone to warm the universe?
Instead of raising a stone to a height, let us carry it along horizontally till we feel the same degree of fatigue. If energy in the using is merely transformed but not lost, we should now be in possession of some power equivalent to the energy expended. But we are not—we have nothing to show for our trouble.
If we construct a water-mill and fix it high and dry in the middle of a plain, instead of under a fall of water, we get no return for the energy expended. By such a law as the conservation of energy, and with the usefulness of a properly placed mill as the measure of compensation, we should receive an equivalent return no matter where the mill is placed. What has place to do with the action of a universal law?
Instead of raising the stone or carrying it horizontally, let us find it near the edge of a precipice and roll it over. There is no proportion between the push that launched the stone, and the force it exhibits on reaching the foot of the precipice. How is the equivalence of energy maintained in this case? It will be replied that the force now at work is gravitation. If so, it was gravitation that brought down the first stone on the post—not any energy transferred from us to the stone. The raising of the stone put us in a position to use the force of gravity, just as climbing the precipice put us in a position to roll the stone over the edge of it.
Such considerations as these make this 'law' incredible to me. But when I pass from the explanation to the concrete facts, I have no difficulty in understanding them. It is the law that is obscure—not the facts.
There exists nothing but living minds of different degrees of energy. We men are small beings associated with a cosmical creature whose force is immeasurably greater than ours, and we have intelligence enough to utilise part of this force to supplement our own. That is the meaning of mechanism. Some efforts to control the cosmic forces are profitable, but there is no transmutation of our energy into the result, nor any necessary equivalence between the labour and the result. We may stumble upon an available cosmic force almost by accident—we may waste a life-time over a mechanical problem and fail to solve it.
The utilisation of cosmic force by man is best explained by comparing it with animal slavery. Trap a wild elephant and train him to draw and carry—you have constructed an engine. There are of course important differences between the two kinds of instrument, due to the enormous disproportion between the magnitude and power of the respective entities. In the case of the animal the whole life comes under our control: in the case of the cosmos we can utilise only a minute fraction of it, and that rather by putting ourselves in its way than by making it obey us. The animal we have to feed: the cosmic being does not draw upon us for its nourishment. We can direct the animal through his sensibility: the cosmic sensibility appears to be beyond our power of irritation.
Apart from these differences the general laws of the one kind of tool are those of the other also. We have not transferred power to the raised stone, or the coiled spring, or the loaded gun, or the embanked river—any more than to the tamed and harnessed horse. There is no fixed ratio between the fatigue of catching and training an animal, and the energy saved by making him work for us. The animal's work is not our own energy given back to us—neither is the machine's. A plough is useless without cattle to draw it—so is a turbine without water to drive it. When coal is burned to 'generate' electricity, that is the cosmic equivalent of exhausting or killing one animal to overpower or to feed another: the energy of combustion is utterly destroyed—not transformed into the electricity.
The question can be more accurately stated and brought to a plain issue if we use the terms and forms of dialectic.
A theory is an argument—when it is not a fallacy—and an argument, we have seen, consists of two parts. There is the matter of fact requiring explanation, and the antecedent knowledge which is used to illustrate it. Of these the precedent is the more important, and it is no valid objection to a criticism that the person who offers it knows less about the case than the theorist. The critic may be in possession of a better precedent, which the theorist has failed to notice, perhaps from a too exclusive attention to the case.
In the question before us the case is Mechanical or Inorganic Energy. It is not an object, but an inference from the knowledge of our personal mental energy. This latter is the only energy we really perceive. But we find in objects, or associated with the perception of them, a power capable of assisting or of opposing our efforts—hence we conclude it is something of the same nature as our own power. We cannot well avoid that inference, and there is no apparent reason why we should try to avoid it.
So far science and philosophy are at one, but here they part company. Philosophy consistently endows Nature with sentiency also, for we never—to our certain knowledge—meet with energy without sentiency, and we have no right to transfer one attribute without the other.
Although science is indebted to the assimilation of organic and inorganic—Nature explained by Man—for the first notion of external energy, no sooner is the notion formed than the argument is discarded, and external energy is declared to be entirely destitute of an organic and mental character. How then is it to be further explained? To what shall it now be likened?
In the materialistic scheme all things are supposed to be resolved into matter and force. Matter is conceived as a self-existent substance, indestructible, &c. It is better known than force, for material things can be directly perceived whereas force is imaginary all the time. Under these circumstances it is natural though illogical to treat force as a species of matter. With only two things left in the universe, the better known of the two will be used to explain the less known, if an explanation is considered indispensable. Force is accordingly brought as a 'case' under matter as a 'precedent,' and is concluded to be indestructible because matter is believed to be indestructible; and when energy appears to be wasted the inference is that it has simply withdrawn from view, like an object that has ceased to be perceived and may be perceived again. That seems to be the evolution of the scientific notion of inorganic energy.
This theorem is fallacious in two respects. There is no such matter as science imagines. Matter is a general idea formed by the study of material objects, which are states of consciousness excited by noumenal contact. It is the average object—a mere affection or formation of the observing mind. We are the makers of matter. Such an idea cannot be said to be indestructible: in a sense it is destroyed in an individual when it is forgotten or inactive; it would certainly be destroyed if all minds ceased to form it. Thus the precedent in the scientific theory of force is itself false.
Then energy is not in the least like matter—either the matter of science or that of philosophy. The energy we really know is a unique experience—not a general idea, nor anything analogous to a phenomenal object; so that even if the proposed precedent were true in itself, it is not applicable to the case. To complete our knowledge of external energy we must go back to that comparison which first suggested to us that there is external energy, namely, the comparison of living man with living nature.
If this is not a correct account of the derivation of the notion that cosmic energy is indestructible, let conservationists tell us what is the parallel on which they are arguing. Here is a blank theorem for completion—
| x | is indestructible |
| Cosmic energy is a sort of x | it must therefore be considered indestructible |
Matter, as we have seen, is not x. Human energy is not x. Our individual power—so far as experience informs us—is destroyed in the using. A day's work exhausts us, and we have to pass into the condition called sleep to be refilled. It is sleep, not food, that refreshes the mind. Food restores the bodily tool we have been working with—puts a fresh edge on the chisel,—but it does not recuperate the power that wields the tool.
What then is x?
NOTE ON DREAMS
If dreams could be studied with our waking consciousness they would throw much light on our mental nature. Being a poor dreamer myself I am not competent to discuss this phase of psychology as it deserves. I think however the bulk of our dreams can be reduced to two principles. There is first the simple lowering of the mental energy, which weakens the attention and dissolves the artificial categories, thus making ordinary reason impossible. There is just enough energy left to revive a few scattered ideas, which blend together without control or regard to precedent. Hence the singular combinations they sometimes form.
In the waking state the objective and intellectual experience are generally more vivid and engrossing than the sentimental—at least in masculine persons. (I deliberately avoid the phrase 'masculine mind,' because there is manifestly no sex in mind.) In dreams the converse of this is the case. The objects we appear to see are dull and indistinct, being ideas mistaken for objects, whilst the feelings are evidently genuine and sometimes of great intensity. This may be explained on the occult principle alluded to in section x.
What I understand by occult influence is this. In ordinary experience the object is first perceived, then a sentiment may be excited either by the same noumenon or by recollection. In the occult procedure this order is reversed. The sentiment is first secretly reached through the chinks of our intellectual armour, and the intellect is not excited at all or only by association. During sleep, when the Self is nearly exhausted of power, it is likely we are more exposed than usual to such influences. They invade our mind and excite our sentiment without awaking the intellect. Whatever ideas accompany the sentiments are generally inadequate to explain them, the stock of available ideas being now reduced.
The conversations we hold in dreams, and the apparent communication of knowledge that takes place, are referred by Du Prel to a division of the ego into two or more individuals who talk together. This notion appears to me forced and unthinkable. Under what image is the ego figured that it should be capable of division? In the waking state we sometimes ask ourselves questions, and on consideration find answers to them. We cannot recall a name, a word, or date, though we know it is somewhere in our memory, and we pause and search till we succeed in exciting the latent image. When this takes place in a dream the information is assumed to come from another individual by an easy dramatisation.
A disturbance in the body during sleep may constitute—like all bodily suffering—a drain upon our mental energy, which will be felt as a sentiment and may excite ideas by sympathy. No doubt many dreams are caused in this manner.
Since our waking consciousness is highly artificial and imaginary, we may infer that whilst dreaming we are nearer to the natural, primitive state of the mind, but in a weakened condition.
[13:] Ueberweg's Logic, Fleming's Vocabulary, and Dickenson's Dict. of Philosophy.
[14:] When the perspective object is accurately measured by instrument at a known distance from the eye, and the tactual size of the object is also known, the associative distance can be calculated by simple proportion. Multiply the measuring distance by the tactual size and divide the product by the perspective size—the quotient is the distance. The perspective size of objects is greatly exaggerated in realism. Most people think they see a man at his full stature for a distance of fifty yards or so. At that distance the tallest man does not measure half an inch in height. At twenty feet a six-foot man measures 3·6 inches—at ten feet 7·2 inches. The people assembled in a room forty feet long range in real—perspective—height from seven inches to two inches. When a man is nearer than ten feet we do not perceive him in one operation—we observe him in parts which we put together in the mind.
[15:] Probably Dr. Johnson meant to be humorous in his way. The principles of Idealism are apt to excite mirth in the unphilosophical, but the laugh is not always on the side of the scoffer. A member of the Persian philosophical sect called Samradians once said to his steward: 'The world and its inhabitants have no actual existence; they have merely an ideal being.' The servant on hearing this took the first favourable opportunity to conceal his master's horse, and when he was about to ride brought him an ass with the horse's saddle. When the Samradian asked, 'Where is the horse?'—the servant replied, 'Thou hast been thinking of an idea; there was no horse in being.' The master answered, 'It is true'; he then mounted the ass, and after riding for some time he suddenly dismounted and taking the saddle off the ass's back placed it on the servant's, drawing the girths tightly; and having forced the bridle into his mouth, he mounted him and flogged him along vigorously. The servant in piteous accents exclaimed, 'What is the meaning of this treatment?'—to which the Samradian replied, 'There is no such thing as a whip; it is merely ideal; thou art only thinking of some illusion.' After which the steward repented and restored the horse.
Another Samradian—or perhaps the same individual—having married the daughter of a rich man, she, on finding out her husband's creed, proposed to have some amusement at his expense. One day the Samradian brought in a bottle of pure wine, which during his absence she emptied of its contents and filled with water. When the time for taking wine arrived she poured out water instead of wine, into a gold cup which was her own property. The Samradian having observed, 'Thou hast given me water instead of wine,'—she answered, 'It is only ideal; there was no wine in existence.' The husband then said, 'Thou hast spoken well; hand me the cup that I may go to a neighbour's house and bring it back full of wine.' He thereupon took out the gold cup, which he sold, and instead of it brought back an earthen vessel full of wine. The wife on seeing this said, 'What hast thou done with the golden cup?' He replied, 'Thou art surely thinking of some ideal golden cup'—on which the woman greatly regretted her witticism.—Dabistán, v. i. p. 199-200.
REDACTION OF COLLOQUIAL
ARGUMENTS
