Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

CHAPTER V
THE WORLD OF THINGS—(2) CHANGE AND
CAUSALITY

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

§ 1. The fourth of the features which characterise the pre-scientific view of the world we found to be the belief that things act and are acted upon by one another. The problems to which this belief gives rise are so vast, and have been historically of such significance for Metaphysics, that they will require a separate chapter for their discussion. In the conception of the interaction of things as it exists for the naïve pre-scientific mind, we may distinguish at least two aspects. There is (1) the belief that things change, that within the unity of the one thing there is a succession of different states; and (2) the belief that the changes of state of various things are so inter-connected that the changes in one thing serve as occasions for definite changes in other things. We thus have to discuss, first, the general notion of change as an inseparable aspect of the being of things, and next the concept of systematic inter-connection between the changes of state of different things.

(a) Change. The problem presented by the apparently unceasing mutability of existence is one of the earliest as well as one of the most persistent in the whole range of Philosophy. In itself it might seem that the successive presentation in time of various states is neither more nor less noteworthy a feature of the world of experience than the simultaneous presentation of a like variety, but the problem of mutability has always appealed with special force to the human imagination from its intimate connection with our personal hopes and fears, ambitions and disappointments. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis; there is the secret of the persistence with which our philosophic thought has from the first revolved round this special problem. There, too, we may find a pregnant hint of the central paradox implied in all mutability—namely, that only the identical and permanent can change. It is because the self which changes with the flux of time and circumstance is still in some measure the same old self that we feel its changes to be so replete with matter for exultation and despair. Were we completely new-made with each successive change in our self, there would no longer be ground for joy in transition to the better or grief at alteration for the worse.

The thought that only what is permanent can change has affected Philosophy in different ways at different periods of its history. At the very dawn of Greek Philosophy it was the guiding principle of the Ionian physicists who sought to comprehend the apparent variety of successive phenomena as the transformations of a single bodily reality. As the difficulties inherent in such a materialistic Monism became more apparent, the felt necessity of ascribing unity of some kind to existence led Parmenides and his Eleatic successors to the extreme view that change, being impossible in a permanent homogeneous bodily reality, must be a mere illusion of our deceptive senses. While yet again the later Ionian physicists, and their Sicilian counterpart Empedocles, sought to reconcile the apparent mutability of things with the criticism of Parmenides by the theory that what appears to the senses as qualitative change is in reality the mere regrouping in space of qualitatively unalterable “elements” or “atoms”—μεῖξις διάλλαξίς τε μιγέντων.

At a more developed stage of Hellenic thought, the necessity of taking some account of the mutability as well as of the permanence of existence impelled Plato to draw the momentous distinction between two worlds or orders of being—the real, with its eternal unvarying self-identity, and the merely apparent, where all is change, confusion, and instability. In spite of Plato’s manifest failure to make it intelligible how these two orders, the eternal and the temporal, are ultimately connected, this distinction in one form or another has continued ever since to haunt all subsequent metaphysical construction. Even our modern scientific Materialism, with its loudly avowed scorn for all merely metaphysical questions, shows by its constant endeavour to reduce all material existence to a succession of changes in a homogeneous medium, both the persistence with which the intellect demands a permanent background for change, and the difficulty of finding logical satisfaction for the demand.

Yet there have not been wanting attempts to get rid of the paradox by denying its truth. As the Eleatics sought to escape it by reducing change itself to a baseless illusion, so some at least of the disciples of Heracleitus seem to have evaded it by refusing to admit any permanent identity in the changeable, and they have not been entirely without imitators in the modern world. Incessant change without underlying unity has had its defenders in the history of Metaphysics, though they have not been numerous, and we must therefore briefly consider what can be urged for and against such a concept. Apart from the general difficulty of seeing how what changes can at the same time be permanently identical with itself, the only special argument in favour of the doctrine that only incessant change is real seems to be the appeal to direct experience. In any actual experience, it is contended, however contracted its limits, we are always presented with the fact of change and transition; we never apprehend an absolutely unchanging content. Even where the object before us exhibits no succession, self-examination will always detect at least alternating tension and relaxation of attention with the accompanying fluctuations of bodily sensation.

Now there can, of course, be no gainsaying these facts of experience, but the conclusion based on them evidently goes much further than the premisses warrant. If experience never gives us mere persistence of an unchanging content, neither does it ever give us mere change without persistence. What we actually experience always exhibits the two aspects of identity and transition together. Usually there will be, side by side with the elements which sensibly change in the course of the experience, others which remain sensibly constant throughout it. And even when, through inattention, we fail to detect these constant elements, the successive states of the changing content itself are not merely momentary; each has its own sensible duration through which it retains its character without perceptible changes. Experience thus entirely fails to substantiate the notion of mere change apart from a background of permanent identity.

The positive disproof of the notion must, however, be found in its own inherent absurdity. Change by itself, apart from a background of identity, is impossible for the reason that where there is no underlying identity there is nothing to change. All change must be change of and in some thing. A mere succession of entirely disconnected contents held together by no common permanent nature persisting in spite of the transition, would not be change at all. If I simply have before me first A and then B, A and B being absolutely devoid of any point of community, there is no sense in saying that I have apprehended a process of change. The change has been at most a change in myself as I passed from the state of perceiving A to the state of perceiving B, and this subjective transition again can only be called change on the assumption that the I who am qualified first by the perception of A and its various emotional and other accompaniments, and then by that of B and its accompaniments, am the same. And where you have not merely a change of perception but an actual perception of change, the case is even clearer. What we perceive in such a case is “A changing into B,” the two successive states A and B being held together by the fact that they are successive states of some more permanent unity [gamma]. Apart from the presence of this identical [gamma] in both the earlier and later stages of the process, there would be no meaning in speaking of it as one of change.

§ 2. Change, then, may be defined as succession within an identity, the identity being as essential to the character of the process as the succession. In what way, then, must we think of this identity or common nature which is present throughout the whole succession of changes? It should be clear that this question—how that which changes can be permanent?—is simply our old problem of quality and substance, how the many states can belong to one thing, considered with special reference to the case of states which form a succession in time. Thus, whatever is the true nature of the unity to which the many states of one thing belong, will also be the true nature of the identity which connects the successive stages of a process of change.