Chapter XIV. Efficient Causality; Phenomenism And Occasionalism.
100. Objective Validity of the Traditional Concept of Efficient Causality.—We have seen how modern sensists, phenomenists, and positivists have doubted or denied the power of the human mind to attain to a knowledge of any objective reality corresponding to the category of substance (§§ [61] sqq.). They treat in a similar way the traditional concept of efficient causality. And in delivering their open or veiled attacks on the real validity of this notion they have made a misleading use of the proper and legitimate function of the inductive sciences. The chief aim of the natural scientist is to seek out and bring to light the whole group of necessitating and indispensable (phenomenal) antecedents of any given kind of event, and to formulate the natural law of their connexion with this kind of event. There is no particular objection to his calling these antecedents the invariable, or even the necessary or necessitating, antecedents of the event; provided he does not claim what he cannot prove—and what, as we shall see later ([104]), is not true, viz.—that the invariability or necessity of this connexion between phenomenal antecedents and consequents is wholly inviolable, fatal, absolute in character. He may rightly claim for any such established connexion the hypothetical, conditional necessity which characterizes all inductively established laws of physical nature. There are such antecedents and consequents in the universe; there are connexions between them which are more than mere casual connexions of time sequence, which are connexions of physical law, inasmuch as they are connexions based on the natures of agencies in an orderly universe, connexions of these agencies with their natural effects. All this is undeniable. Moreover, so long as the scientist confines himself to inferences concerning such connexions between phenomena, to inferences and generalizations based on the assumed uniformity of nature, he is working in his proper sphere. Nay, even if he chooses to [pg 382] designate these groups of invariable phenomenal antecedents by the title of “physical causes” we know what he means; though we perceive some danger of confusion, inasmuch as we see him arrogating to the notion of regularity or uniformity of connexion i.e. to the notion of physical law, a term, causality, which traditionally expressed something quite distinct from this, viz. the notion of positive influence of one thing on the being or happening of another. But when phenomenist philosophers adopt this usage we cannot feel reassured against the danger of confusion by such protestations as those of Mill in the following passage:—[469]
I premise, then, that when in the course of this inquiry I speak of the cause of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause which is not itself a phenomenon; I make no research into the ultimate or ontological cause of anything. To adopt a distinction familiar in the writings of the Scotch metaphysicians, and especially of Reid, the causes with which I concern myself are not efficient, but physical causes. They are causes in that sense alone, in which one physical fact is said to be the cause of another. Of the efficient causes of phenomena, or whether any such causes exist at all I am not called upon to give an opinion. 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 cannot, 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. No such necessity exists for the purposes of the present inquiry, nor will any such doctrine be found in the following pages. The only notion of a cause, which the theory of induction requires, is such a notion as can be gained by experience. The Law of Causation, which is the main pillar of inductive science, is but the familiar truth, that invariability of succession is found by observation to obtain between every fact in nature and some other fact which has preceded it; independently of all considerations respecting the ultimate mode of production of phenomena, and of every other question regarding the nature of “Things in themselves”.
This passage—which expresses fairly well the phenomenist and positivist attitude in regard to the reality, or at least the cognoscibility, of efficient causes—fairly bristles with inaccuracies, misconceptions, and false insinuations.[470] But we are concerned here [pg 383] only with the denial that any notion of an efficient cause “can be gained from experience,” and the doubt consequently cast on the objective validity of this notion. The Sensism which regards our highest intellectual activities as mere organic associations of sentient states of consciousness, has for its logical issue the Positivism which contends that all valid knowledge is confined to the existence and time and space relations of sense phenomena. In thus denying to the mind all power of attaining to a valid knowledge of anything suprasensible—such as substance, power, force, efficient cause, etc.—Positivism passes over into Agnosticism.
In refutation of this philosophy, in so far as it denies that we have any grounds in experience for believing in the real existence of efficient causes, we may set down in the first place this universal belief itself of the human race that there are in the universe efficient causes of the events that happen in it. Men universally believe that they themselves as agents contribute by a real and positive influence to the actual occurrence of their own thoughts, reasonings, wishes, desires, sensations; that their mental resolves to speak, walk, write, eat, or perform any other external, bodily [pg 384] works do really, positively, and efficiently produce or cause those works; that external phenomena have a real influence on happenings in their own bodies, that fire burns them and food nourishes them; that external phenomena also have a real and positive influence on their sense organs, and through these on their minds by the production there of conscious states such as sensations; finally that external phenomena have a real and positive influence on one another; that by action and interaction they really produce the changes that are constantly taking place in the universe: that the sun does really heat and light the earth, that the sowing of the seed in springtime has really a positive influence on the existence of crops in the harvest, that the taking of poison has undoubtedly a real influence on the death which results from it. And if any man of ordinary intelligence and plain common sense is told that such belief is an illusion, that in all such cases the connexion between the things, facts or events which he designates as “cause” and “effect,” is a mere connexion of invariable time sequence between antecedents and consequents, that in no case is there evidence of any positive, productive influence of the one fact upon the other, he will either smile incredulously and decline to take his objector seriously, or he will simply ask the latter to prove the universal belief to be an illusion. His conviction of the real and objective validity of his notion of efficient cause, as something which positively influences the happening of things, is so profound and ineradicable that it must necessarily be grounded in, and confirmed by, his constant experience of the real world in which he lives and moves. Not that he professes to be able to explain the nature of this efficient influence in which he believes. Even if he were a philosopher he might not be able to satisfy himself or others on this point But being a plain man of ordinary intelligence he has sense enough to distinguish between the existence of a fact and its nature, its explanation, its quomodo; and to believe in the real existence of a positive efficient, productive influence of cause on effect, however this influence is to be conceived or explained.
A second argument for the objective validity of the concept of efficient cause may be drawn from a consideration of the Principle of Causality. The experience on which the plain man grounds his belief in the validity of his notion of cause is not mere uninterpreted sense experience in its raw and brute condition, so to speak; it is this sense experience rationalized, assimilated into [pg 385] his intelligence—spontaneously and half unconsciously, perhaps—by the light of the self-evident Principle of Causality, that whatever happens has a cause. When the plain man believes that all the various agencies in nature, like those enumerated above, are not merely temporal antecedents or concomitants of their effects, but are really productive of those effects, he is really applying the universal and necessary truth—that an “event,” a “happening,” a “change,” a “commencement” of any new actual mode of being demands the existence of another actual being as cause—the truth embodied in the Principle of Causality, to this, that, and the other event of his experience: he is locating the “causes” of these events in the various persons and things which he regards as the agents or producers of these events. In making such applications he may very possibly err in detail. But no actual application of the principle at all is really required for establishing the objective validity of the concept of cause. There are philosophers who—erroneously, as we shall see—deny that the Principle of Causality finds its application in the domain of created things, who hold, in other words, that no created beings can be efficient causes (102), and who nevertheless recognize, and quite rightly, that the concept of efficient cause is an objectively valid concept. And they do so because they see that since events, beginnings, happenings, changes, are real, there must be really and objectively existent an efficient cause of them—whatever and wherever such efficient cause may be: whether it be one or manifold, finite or infinite, etc.
We have already examined Hume's attempt to deny the ontological necessity of the Principle of Causality and to substitute therefor a subjectively or psychologically necessary “feeling of expectation” grounded on habitual association of ideas. Kant, on the other hand, admits the self-evident, necessary character of the Principle; but holds that, since this necessity is engendered by the mind's imposing a subjective form of thought on the data of sense consciousness, the principle is validly applicable only to connexions within the world of mental appearances, and not at all to the world of real being. He thus transfers the discussion to the domain of Epistemology, where in opposition to his theory of knowledge the Principle of Causality can be shown to be applicable to all contingent reality, and to be therefore legitimately employed in Natural Theology for the purpose of establishing the real existence of an Uncaused First Cause.
101. Origin of the Concept of Efficient Cause.—We have seen that universal belief in the real existence of efficient causes is grounded in experience. The formation of the concept, [pg 386] and its application or extension to the world within and around us, are gradual.[471] Active power, force, energy, efficiency, faculty, or by whatever other name we may call it, is of course experienced only in its actual exercise, in action, motion, production of change. Our first experience of its exercise is found in our consciousness of our own personal activities, mental and bodily: in our thinking, willing or choosing, in our deliberate control of our mental processes, and in the deliberate exercise of our sense faculties and bodily organs. In all this we are conscious of exerting power, force, energy: we apprehend ourselves as agents or efficient causes of our mental processes and bodily movements. We apprehend these happenings as due to the exercise of our own power to produce them. Seeing other human beings behave like ourselves, we infer by analogy that they also possess and exercise active powers like our own, that they, too, are efficient causes. Finally, observing that effects like to those produced by ourselves, whether in ourselves or in the material world around us, are also consequent on certain other changes in external nature, whether organic or inorganic, we infer by analogy that these corporeal things have also powers, forces, energies, whereby they produce these effects. While our senses testify only to time and space connexions between physical happenings in external nature, our intellect apprehends action and interaction, i.e. causal dependence of events on the active influence or efficiency of physical things as agents or causes.[472] Thus, our knowledge of the existence and nature of the forces, powers and energies which constitute material things efficient causes is posterior to, and derived by analogy from, our knowledge of the mental and bodily powers which reveal themselves to us in our conscious vital processes as constituting our own personal efficient causality.
This conception of efficient causality even in the inanimate things of external nature, after the analogy of our own vital powers as revealed in our conscious activities, is sometimes disparaged as naïve anthropomorphism. It just depends on the manner [pg 387] and degree in which we press the analogy. Observing that our earlier notion of cause is “the notion of power combined with a purpose and an end” (thus including efficient and final causality), Newman remarks[473] that “Accordingly, wherever the world is young, the movements and changes of physical nature have been and are spontaneously ascribed by its people to the presence and will of hidden agents, who haunt every part of it, the woods, the mountains and the streams, the air and the stars, for good or for evil—just as children again, by beating the ground after falling, imply that what has bruised them has intelligence”. This is anthropomorphism. So, too, would be the conception of the forces or powers of inanimate nature as powers of sub-conscious “perception” and “appetition” (Leibniz), or, again, as rudimentary or diminished “will-power” (Cousin).[474] “Physical phenomena, as such, are without sense,” as Newman rightly observes; and consequently we may not attribute to them any sort of conscious efficiency, whether perceptive or appetitive. But Newman appears to err in the opposite direction when he adds that “experience teaches us nothing about physical phenomena as causes”.[475] The truth lies between these extremes. Taking experience in the wide sense in which it includes rational interpretation of, and inference from, the data of internal and external sense perception, experience certainly reveals to us the existence of physical phenomena as efficient causes, or in other words that there is real and efficient causality not only in our own persons but also in the external physical universe; and as to the nature of this causality it also gives us at least some little reliable information.
By pursuing this latter question a little we shall be led to examine certain difficulties which lie at the root of Occasionalism: the error of denying that creatures, or at least merely corporeal [pg 388] creatures, can be in any true sense efficient causes. A detailed inquiry into the nature of the active powers, forces or energies of the inorganic universe, i.e. into the nature of corporeal efficient causality, belongs to Cosmology; just as a similar inquiry into vital, sentient and spiritual efficient causality belongs to Psychology. Here we have only to ascertain what is common and essential to all efficient causality as such, what in general is involved in the exercise of efficient causality, in actio and passio, and what are the main implications revealed in a study of it.
102. Analysis of Efficient Causality, or Actio and Passio: (a) The First Cause and Created Causes.—We have already referred to the universal dependence of all created causes on the First Cause; and we shall have occasion to return to it in connexion with Occasionalism. God has created all second causes; He has given them their powers of action; He conserves their being and their powers in existence; He applies these powers or puts them in act; He concurs with all their actions; He is therefore the principal cause of all their effects; and in relation to Him they are as instrumental causes: “Deus est causa actionis cujuslibet inquantum dat virtutem agendi, et inquantum conservat eam, et inquantum applicat actioni, et inquantum ejus virtute omnis alia virtus agit.”[476]
In our analysis of change ([10]) we saw why no finite, created agent can be the adequate cause of the new actualities or perfections involved in change, and how we are therefore obliged, by a necessity of thought, to infer the existence of a First Cause, an Unchanging, Infinite Source of these new actualities.[477]
The principle upon which the argument was based is this: that the actuality of the effect is something over and above the reality which it had in the passive potentiality of its created material cause and in the active powers of its created efficient cause antecedently to its production: that therefore the production of this actuality, this novum esse, implies the influence—by way of co-operation or concursus with the created efficient cause—of an Actual Being in whom the actuality of all effects is contained in an eminently perfect way. Even with the Divine [pg 389] concursus a created cause cannot itself create, because even with this concursus its efficiency attains only to the modifying or changing of pre-existing being: and in creation there is no pre-existing being, no material cause, no real passive potentiality to be actuated. But without this concursus not only can it not create; it cannot even, as an efficient cause, actuate a real pre-existing potentiality. And why? Because its efficiency cannot attain to the production of new actuality. It determines the mode of this actuality, and therein precisely lies the efficiency of the created cause. But the positive entity or perfection of this new actuality can be produced only by the Infinite, Changeless, Inexhaustible Source of all actuality, co-operating with the created cause[478] ([103]).
But, it might be objected, perhaps created efficient causes are themselves the adequate and absolutely independent principles of the whole actuality of their effects? They cannot be such; and that for the simple reason that they are not always in act. Were they such they should be always and necessarily in act: they should always and necessarily contain in themselves, and that actually and in an eminently perfect manner, all the perfections of all the effects which they gradually produce in the universe. But experience shows us that created causes are not always acting, that their active power, their causality in actu primo is not to be identified with their action, their causality in actu secundo; and reason tells us that since this is so, since action is something more than active power, since a cause acting has more actuality than the same cause not acting, it must have been [pg 390] determined or reduced to action by some actuality other than itself. This surplus of actuality or perfection in an acting cause, as compared with the same cause prior to its acting, is the Divine concursus. In other words, an active power which is really distinct from its action requires to be moved or reduced to its act (which is actio) no less than a passive potentiality required to be moved to its act (which is passio), by some really distinct actual being. A created efficient cause, therefore, by passing from the state of rest, or mere power to act, into the state of action, is perfected by having its active power actualized, i.e. by the Divine concursus: in this sense action is a perfection of the agent. But it is not an entitative perfection of the latter's essence; it is not a permanent or stable elevation or perfection of the latter's powers; it is not the completion of any passive potentiality of the latter; nor therefore is it properly speaking a change of the agent as such; it is, as we have said already, rather an index of the latter's perfection in the scale of real being.[479] Action really perfects the patiens; and only when this is identical in its concrete individuality with the agens is the latter permanently perfected by the action.
The action of created causes, therefore, depends on the action of the First Cause. We derive our notion of action from the former and apply it analogically to the latter. If we compare them we shall find that, notwithstanding many differences, the notion of action in general involves a “simple” or “unmixed” perfection which can, without anthropomorphism, be applied analogically to the Divine Action. The Divine Action is identical with the Divine Power and the Divine Essence. In creatures essence, power and action are really distinct. The Divine Action, when creative, has not for its term a change in the strict sense ([10], [11]), for it produces being ex nihilo, whereas the action of creatures cannot have for term the production of new being ex nihilo, but only the change of pre-existing being. The Divine Action, whether in creating or conserving or concurring with creatures, implies in God no real transition from power to act; whereas the action of creatures does imply such transition in them. Such are the differences; but with them there is this point of agreement: the Divine Action implies in God an efficiency which has [pg 391] for its term the origin of new being dependently on this efficiency.[480] So, too, does the action of creatures. Positive efficient influence on the one side, and the origin, production, or “fieri” of new actual being on the other, with a relation of real dependence on this efficiency: such is the essential note of all efficient causality, whether of God or of creatures.[481]
103. (b) Actio Immanens and Actio Transiens.—Let us compare in the next place the perfectly immanent spiritual causality of thought, the less perfectly immanent organic causality of living things, and the transitive physical causality of the agencies of inorganic nature. The term of an immanent action remains either within the very faculty which elicits it, affecting this faculty as a habit: thus acts of thought terminate in the intellectual habits called sciences, acts of free choice in the habits of will called virtues or vices.[482] Or it remains at least within the agent: as when in the vital process of nutrition the various parts and members of the living organism so interact as procure the growth and development of the living individual which is the cause of these functions.[483] In those cases the agent itself is the patiens, whereas every agency in the inorganic universe acts not upon itself, but only on some other thing, transitively. But immanent action, no less than transitive action, is productive of real change—not, [pg 392] of course, in the physical sense in which this term is identified with “motion” and understood of corporeal change, but in the metaphysical sense of an actuation of some passive potentiality ([10], [11]).[484]
What, then, do we find common to the immanent and the transitive causality of created causes? An active power or influence on the side of the agent, an actuation of this active power, either by the action of other causes on this agent, or by the fulfilment of all conditions requisite for the action of the agent, and in all cases by the concursus of the First Cause; and, on the side of the effect, the production of some new actuality, the actuation of some passive potentiality, dependently on the cause now in action.
Thus we see that in all cases action, or the exercise of efficient causality, implies that something which was not actual becomes actual, that something which was not, now is; and that this becoming, this actuation, this production, is really and essentially dependent on the influence, the efficiency, of some actual being or beings, which we therefore call efficient causes.
104. Erroneous Theories of Efficient Causality. Imagination and Thought.—Are we certain of anything more about the nature of this connecting link between efficient cause and effect, which we call action? Speculations and theories there are indeed in abundance. Some of these can be shown to be false; and thus our knowledge of the real nature of action may be at least negatively if not positively perfected. Our concept of action is derived, like all our concepts, from experience; and although we are conscious of spiritual action in the exercise of intellect and will, yet it is inseparably allied with sentient action and this again with organic and corporeal action. Nor can we conceive or describe spiritual action without the aid of imagination images, or in language other than that borrowed from the domain of corporeal things, which are the proper object of the human intellect.[485] Now in all this there is a danger: the danger of mistaking imagination images for thoughts, and of giving a literal sense to language in contexts where this language must be rightly understood to apply only analogically.
In analysing the nature of efficient causality we might be tempted to think that we understood it by imagining some sort of a flow or transference of some sort of actual reality from agens to patiens. It is quite true that in describing action, the actual connecting link between agens and patiens, we have to use language suggestive of some such imagination image. We have no option in the matter, for all human language is based upon sense consciousness of physical phenomena. When we describe efficiency as an “influence” of cause on effect, or the effect as “dependent” on the cause, the former term suggests a “flowing,” just as the latter suggests a “hanging”. So, too, when we speak of the effect as “arising,” “originating,” “springing,” [pg 393] or “emanating,” from the cause.[486] But we have got to ask ourselves what such language means, i.e., what concepts it expresses, and not what imagination images accompany the use of it.
Now when we reflect that the senses testify only to time and space sequences and collocations of the phenomena which we regard as causally connected, and when we feel convinced that there is something more than this in the causal connexion,—which something more we describe in the terms illustrated above,—we must inquire whether we have any rational ground for thinking that this something more is really anything in the nature of a spatial transference of some actual reality from agens to patiens. 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. As a matter of fact there is no rational ground for believing in any such transference, and even were there such transference, so far from its being the only intelligible explanation of efficient causality, it would leave the whole problem entirely unexplained—and not merely the problem of spiritual, immanent causality, to which it is manifestly inapplicable, but even the problem of corporeal, transitive causality.[487]
We have already referred at some length ([9-11]) to the philosophy which has endeavoured to reduce all change, or at least all corporeal change, to mechanical change; all qualities, powers, forces, energies of the universe, to ultimate particles or atoms of matter in motion; and all efficient causality to a flow or transference of spatial motion from particle to particle or from body to body. A full analysis of all such theories belongs to Cosmology. But we may recall a few of the more obvious considerations already urged against them.
In the first place, the attempt to explain all qualities in the material universe—all the powers, forces, energies, of matter—by maintaining that objectively and extramentally they are all purely quantitative realities, all spatial motions of matter—does not explain the qualitative factors and distinctions in the world of our sense experience at all, but simply transfers the problem of explaining them from the philosophy of matter to the philosophy of mind, by making them all subjective after the manner of Kant's analysis of experience ([11]).
In the second place, when we endeavour to conceive, to apprehend intellectually, how motion, or indeed any other physical or real entity, could actually pass or be transferred from agens to patiens, whether these be spatially in contact or not, we find such a supposition positively unintelligible. [pg 394] Motion is not a substance; and if it is an accident it cannot migrate from subject to subject. The idea that corporeal efficient causality—even mechanical causality—can be explained by such a transference of actual accidental modes of being from agens to patiens is based on a very crude and erroneous conception of what an accidental mode of being really is ([65]).
The more we reflect on the nature of real change in the universe, and of the efficient causality whereby it is realized, the more convinced we must become that there can be no satisfactory explanation of these facts which does not recognize and take account of this great fundamental fact: that contingent real being is not all actual, that it is partly potential and partly actual; that therefore our concepts of “passive potentiality” and “active power” are not mere subjective mental motions, with at best a mere regulative or systematizing function (after the manner of Kant's philosophy), but that they are really and objectively valid concepts—concepts which from the time of Aristotle have given philosophers the only insight into the nature of efficient causality which is at any rate satisfactory and intelligible as far as it goes.
Of this great fact the advocates of the mechanical theory of efficient causality have, in the third place, failed to take account. And it is partly because with the revival of atomism at the dawn of modern philosophy this traditional Aristotelian conception of contingent being as potential and actual was lost sight of ([64]), that such a crude and really unintelligible account of efficient causality, as a “flow of motion,” has been able to find such continued and widespread acceptance.
Another reason of the prevalence of this tendency to “explain” all physical efficient causality as a propagation of spatial motions of matter is to be found in the sensist view of the human mind which confounds intellectual thought with mental imagery, which countenances only picturable factors in its “explanations,” and denounces as “metaphysical,” “occult,” and “unverifiable” all explanatory principles such as forces, powers, potentialities, etc., which are not directly picturable in the imagination.[488] And it is a curious fact that it is such philosophers themselves who are really guilty of the charge which they lay at the door of the traditional metaphysics: the charge of offering explanations—of efficient causality, for instance—which are really no explanations. For while they put forward their theory of the “flow of motion” as a real explanation of the quomodo of efficient causality—and the ultimate and only explanation of it within reach of the human mind, if we are to accept their view of the matter—the exponent of the traditional metaphysics more modestly confines himself to setting forth the inevitable implications of the fact of efficient causality, and, without purporting to offer any positive explanation of the real nature of action or efficient influence, he is content to supplement his analysis negatively by pointing out the unintelligible and illusory character of their proffered “explanations”.
In the exact methods of the physical sciences, their quantitative evaluation of all corporeal forces whether mechanical, physical, or chemical, in terms of mechanical work, which is measured by the motion of matter through space, and in the great physical generalization known as the law of the equivalence of energies, or of the equality of action and reaction,—we can detect yet further apparent reasons for the conception of efficient causality as [pg 395] a mere transference or interchange of actual physical and measurable entities among bodies. It is an established fact not only that all corporeal agents gradually lose their energy or power of action by actually exercising this power, but that this loss of energy is in direct proportion to the amount of energy gained by the recipients of their action; and this fact would naturally suggest the mental picture of a transference of some actual measurable entity from cause to effect. But it does not necessarily imply such transference—even if the latter were intelligible, which, as we have seen, it is not. The fact is quite intelligibly explained by the natural supposition that in proportion as the agens exhausts its active power by exercise the patiens gains in some form of actuality. Similarly, the fact that all forms of corporeal energy can be measured in terms of mechanical energy does not at all imply that they all really are mechanical energy, but only that natural agents can by the use of one form of energy produce another form in equivalent quantity. And finally, the law of the conservation of corporeal energy in the universe is explained by the law of the equality of action and reaction, and without recourse to the unintelligible supposition that this sum-total of energy is one unchanging and unchangeable actuality.
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. We allude to the general assumption of physical scientists that corporeal action of whatsoever kind takes place only on contact, whether mediate or immediate, between the bodies in question.[489] Now it is well to bear in mind that this is not a self-evident truth or principle, but only an hypothesis, a very legitimate hypothesis and one which works admirably, but still only an hypothesis. It implies the assumption that some sort of substance—called the universal ether—actually exists and fills all space, serving as a medium for the action of gravitation, light, radiant heat, electricity and magnetism, between the earth and the other planets, the sun and the stars. This whole supposition is the only thinkable alternative to actio in distans. If those bodies really act on one another—and the fact that they do is undeniable,—and if there were no such medium between them, then the causal influence of one body should be able to produce an effect in another body spatially distant from, and not physically connected by any material medium with, the former. Hence two questions: Is this alternative, actio in distans, imaginable? i.e. can we form any positive imagination image of how this would take place? And secondly: Is it thinkable, conceivable, intrinsically possible? We need not hesitate to answer the former question in the negative. But as to the latter question all we can say is that we have never met any cogent proof of the intrinsic impossibility of actio in distans. The efficient action of a finite cause implies that it has active power and is [pg 396] conserved in existence with this power by the Creator or First Cause, that this power is reduced to act by the Divine concursus, and that dependently on this cause so acting some change takes place, some potentiality is actualized in some other finite being. Nothing more than this is involved in the general concept of efficient causality. Of course real influence on the one side, and real dependence on the other, imply some real connexion of cause with effect. But is spatial connexion a necessary condition of real connexion? Is a physical, phenomenal, imaginable, efflux of some entity out of the cause into the effect, either immediately or through some medium as a channel, a necessary condition for real influence? There is nothing of the kind in spiritual causality; and to demand anything of the kind for causality in general would be to make imagination, not thought, the test and measure of the real. But perhaps spatial connexion is essential to the real connexion involved in this particular kind of causality, corporeal causality? Perhaps. But it has never been proved. Too little is known about the reality of space, about the ultimate nature of material phenomena and their relation to our minds, to justify anything like dogmatism on such an ultimate question. It may well be that if we had a deeper insight into these things we could pronounce actio in distans to be absolutely incompatible with the essences of the things which do as a matter of fact constitute the actual corporeal universe. But in the absence of such insight we cannot pronounce actio in distans to be intrinsically impossible. Physical scientists assume that as a matter of fact bodies do not act in distans. Granted the assumption to be correct, it still remains an open question whether by a miracle they could act in distans, i.e. whether or not such action would be incompatible with their nature as finite corporeal causes.
Owing to a very natural tendency to rest in imagination images we are inclined not only to pronounce as impossible any process the mode of which is not positively imaginable, but also to think that we rightly understand a process once we have provided ourselves with an imagination image of it—when as a matter of fact this image may cover an entirely groundless conception or theory of the process. Hence the fairly prevalent idea that while actio in distans is impossible, the interaction of bodies on contact is perfectly intelligible and presents no difficulties. When a billiard ball in motion strikes another at rest it communicates some or all of its motion to the other, and that is all: nothing simpler! And then all the physical, chemical, and substantial changes in the material universe are reducible to this common denominator! The atomic philosophy, with its two modest postulates of matter and motion, is a delightfully simple philosophy; but unfortunately for its philosophical prestige it does not explain causality or change. Nor can these facts be explained by any philosophy which ignores the most elementary implication of all real change: the implication that changing reality involves real passive potentialities and real active powers or forces in the phenomena which constitute the changing reality of the universe.
105. The Subject of Efficient Causality. Occasionalism.—We have established the objective validity of the concept of efficient causality and analysed its implications. There have been philosophers who, while admitting the objective validity [pg 397] of the concept, have maintained that no creature, or at least no corporeal creature, can be an efficient cause. Efficient influence is, in their view, incompatible with the nature of a corporeal substance: only spiritual substances can be efficient causes: corporeal things, conditions, and happenings, are all only the occasions on which spiritual substances act efficiently in and through all created nature. Hence the name of the theory: Occasionalism. There are two forms of it: the milder, which admits that created spirits or minds are efficient causes; and the more extreme view, according to which no creature can be an efficient cause, inasmuch as efficient causality is essentially a Divine attribute, a prerogative of the Divinity.
This error was not unknown in the Middle Ages,[490] but it was in the seventeenth century that certain disciples of Descartes,—Geulincx (1625-1669) and Malebranche (1638-1715),—expressly inferred it from the Cartesian antithesis of matter and spirit and the Cartesian doctrine that matter is essentially inert, or inactive. According to the gratuitous and unproven assertion laid down by Geulincx as a principle: Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis,—we do not cause our own sensations or reasoning processes, nor our own bodily movements, inasmuch as we do not know how these take place; nor can bodies cause them, any more than our own created spirits, inasmuch as bodies are essentially inactive. According to Malebranche the mind can perceive no necessary nexus between effects and any cause other than the Divine Will;[491] moreover reflection convinces us that efficient causality is something essentially Divine and incommunicable to creatures;[492] and finally neither bodies can be causes, for they are essentially inert, nor our minds and wills, for we do not know how a volition could move any organ or member of our bodies.[493] Yet Malebranche, at the cost of inconsistency with his own [pg 398] principles, safeguards free will in man by allowing an exclusively immanent efficiency to spiritual causes.[494]
Such is the teaching of Occasionalism. Our criticism of it will be brief.[495]
(1) Against the doctrine that creatures generally are not, and cannot be, efficient causes, we direct the first argument already outlined ([100]) against Phenomenism and Positivism,—the argument from the universal belief of mankind, based on the testimony of consciousness as rationally interpreted by human intelligence. Consciousness testifies not merely that processes of thought, imagination, sensation, volition, etc., take place within our minds; not merely that our bodily movements, such as speaking, walking, writing, occur; but that we are the causes of them.[496] It is idle to say that we do not efficiently move our limbs because we may not be able to understand or explain fully “how an unextended volition can move a material limb”.[497] Consciousness testifies to the fact that the volition does move the limb; and that is enough.[498] The fact is one thing, the quomodo of the fact is quite another thing. Nor is there any ground whatever for the assertion that a cause, in order to produce an effect, must understand how the exercise of its own efficiency brings that effect about. Moreover, Malebranche's concession of at least immanent activity to the will is at all events an admission that there is in the nature of the creature as such nothing incompatible with its being an efficient cause.
(2) Although Malebranche bases his philosophy mainly on deductive, a priori reasonings from a consideration of the Divine attributes, his system is really derogatory to the perfection of the First Cause, and especially to the Divine Wisdom. To say, for instance, that God created an organ so well adapted to discharge the function of seeing as the human eye, and then to deny that the latter discharges this or any function, is tantamount to accusing God of folly. There is no reason in this system why any created thing or condition of things would be even the appropriate occasion of the First Cause producing any definite effect. Everything would be an equally appropriate occasion, or rather nothing would be in any intelligible sense an appropriate occasion, for any exercise of the Divine causality. The admirable order of the universe—with its unity in variety, its adaptation of means to ends, its gradation of created perfections—is an intelligible manifestation of the Divine perfections on the assumption that creatures efficiently co-operate with the First Cause in realizing and maintaining this order. But if they were all inert, inoperative, useless for this purpose, what could be the raison d'être of their diversified endowments and perfections? So far from manifesting the wisdom, power and goodness of God they would evidence an aimless and senseless prodigality.
(3) Occasionalism imperils the distinction between creatures and a personal God. Although Malebranche, fervent catholic that he was, protested against the pantheism of “le misérable Spinoza,” his own system contains the undeveloped germ of this pernicious error. For, if creatures are not efficient causes not only are their variety and multiplicity meaningless, as contributing nothing towards the order of the universe, but their very existence as distinct realities seems to have no raison d'être. Malebranche emphasizes the truth that God does nothing useless: Dieu ne fait rien d'inutile. Very well. If, then, a being does nothing, what purpose is served by its existence? Of what use is it? What is the measure of a creature's reality, if not its action and its power of action? So intimately in fact is this notion of causality bound up with the notion of the very reality of things that the concept of an absolutely inert, inactive reality is scarcely intelligible. It is almost an axiom in scholastic philosophy that every nature has its correlative activity, every being its operation: Omne ens est propter suam operationem; Omnis natura ordinatur ad propriam operationem. Hence if what we call creatures had [pg 400] really no proper activity distinct from that of the First Cause, on what grounds could we suppose them to have a real and proper existence of their own distinct from the reality of the Infinite Being? Or who could question the lawfulness of the inference that they are not really creatures, but only so many phases, aspects, manifestations of the one and sole existing reality? Which is Pantheism.
(4) Occasionalism leads to Subjective Idealism by destroying all ground for the objective validity of human science. How do we know the real natures of things? By reasoning from their activities in virtue of the principle, Operari sequitur esse.[499] But if things have no activities, no operations, such reasoning is illusory. How, for instance, do we justify by rational demonstration, in opposition to subjectivism, the common-sense interpretation of the data of sense consciousness as revealing to us the real and extramental existence of a material universe? By arguing, in virtue of the principle of causality, from our consciousness of our own passivity in external sense perception, to the real existence of bodies outside our minds, as excitants of our cognitive activity and partial causes of these conscious, perceptive processes. But if occasionalism were true such inference would be illusory, and we should infer, with Berkeley, that only God and minds exist, but not any material universe. Malebranche admits the possible validity of this inference to immaterialism from his principles, and grounds his own belief in the existence of an external material universe solely on faith in Divine Revelation.[500]
It only remains to answer certain difficulties urged by occasionalists against the possibility of attributing real efficiency to creatures.
(1) They argue that efficient causality is something essentially Divine, and therefore cannot be communicated to creatures.
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 just as the fact that creatures have real being, real existence, distinct from, but dependent on, the existence of the Infinite Being, does not derogate from the supremacy of the latter, so the fact that creatures have real efficient causality, distinct from, but dependent on, the causality of the First Cause, does not derogate from the latter's supremacy.
(2) They urge that efficient causality is creative, and therefore infinite and incommunicable.
We reply that there is a plain distinction between creative activity and the efficient activity we claim for creatures. Creation is the production of new being from nothingness. God alone, the Infinite Being, can create; and, furthermore, according to the common view of Theistic philosophers a creature cannot even be an instrument of the First Cause in this production of new being from nothingness. And the main reason for this appears to be that the efficiency of the creature, acting, of course, with the Divine concursus, necessarily presupposes some pre-existing being as material on which to operate, and is confined to the change or determination of new forms or modes of this pre-existing reality. Such efficiency, subordinate to the Divine concursus and limited to such an order of effects, is plainly distinct from creative activity.
(3) But the creature, acting with the Divine concursus, either contributes something real and positive to the effect or contributes nothing. The former alternative is inadmissible, for God is the cause of everything real and positive: omne novum ens est a Deo. And in the latter alternative, which is the true one, the concursus is superfluous; God does all; and creatures are not really efficient causes.
We reply that the former alternative, not the latter, is the true one. But the former alternative does not imply that the creature produces any new reality independently of the First Cause; nor is it incompatible with the truth that God is the author and cause of all positive reality: omne novum ens est a Deo. No doubt, were we to conceive the co-operation of God and the creature after the manner of the co-operation of two partial causes of the same order, producing by their joint efficiency [pg 402] some one total effect—like the co-operation of two horses drawing a cart,—it would follow that the creature's share of the joint effect would be independent of the Divine concursus and attributable to the creature alone, that the creature would produce some reality independently of the First Cause. But that is not the way in which the First Cause concurs with created causes. They are not partial causes of the same order. Each is a total cause in its own order. They so co-operate that God, besides having created and now conserving the second cause, and moving the latter's power to act, produces Himself the whole effect directly and immediately by the efficiency of His concursus; while at the same time the second cause, thus reduced to act, and acting with the concursus, also directly and immediately produces the whole effect. There is one effect, one change in facto esse, one change in fieri, and therefore one action as considered in the subject changed, since the action takes place in this latter: actio fit in passo. This change, this action considered thus passively, or “in passo,” is the total term of each efficiency, the Divine and the created, not partly of the one and partly of the other. It is one and indivisible; it is wholly due to, and wholly attained by, each efficiency; not, however, under the same formal aspect. We may distinguish in it two formalities: it is a novum ens, a new actuality, something positive and actual superadded to the existing order of real, contingent being; but it is not “being in general” or “actuality in general,” it is some specifically, nay individually, determinate mode of actuality or actual being. We have seen that it is precisely because every real effect has the former aspect that it demands for its adequate explanation, and as its only intelligible source, the presence and influence of a purely actual, unchanging, infinite, inexhaustible productive principle of all actual contingent reality: hence the necessity and efficacy of the Divine concursus. And similarly it is because the new actuality involved in every change is an individually definite mode of actuality that we can detect in it the need for, and the efficacy of, the created cause: the nature of this latter, the character and scope and intensity of its active power is what determines the individuality of the total result, to the total production of which it has by the aid of the Divine concursus attained.
(4) But God can Himself produce the total result under both formalities without any efficiency of the creature. Therefore the [pg 403] difficulty remains that the latter efficiency is superfluous and useless: and entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
We reply that as a matter of fact the effects produced in the ordinary course of nature are produced by God under both formalities; but also by the created cause under both formalities: inasmuch as the formalities are but mentally distinct aspects of one real result which is, as regards its extrinsic causes, individual and indivisible. The distinction of these formal aspects only helps us to realize how de facto such an effect is due to the cooperation of the First Cause and created causes. That God could produce all such effects without any created causes—we must distinguish. Some such effects He could not produce without created causes, for such production would be self-contradictory. He could not produce, for instance, a volition except as the act of a created will, or a thought except as the act of a created intellect, or a vital change except as the act of a living creature. But apart from such cases which would involve an intrinsic impossibility, God could of course produce, without created agents, the effects which He does produce through their created efficiency. It is, however, not a question of what could be, but of what actually is. And we think that the arguments already set forth prove conclusively that creatures are not de facto the inert, inactive, aimless and unmeaning things they would be if Occasionalism were the true interpretation of the universe of our actual experience; but that these creatures are in a true sense efficient causes, and that just as by their very co-existence with God, as contingent beings, they do not derogate from His Infinite Actuality but rather show forth His Infinity, so by their cooperation with Him as subordinate and dependent efficient causes they do not derogate from His supremacy as First Cause, but rather show forth the infinite and inexhaustible riches of His Wisdom and Omnipotence.