Now it seems clear that, if the creative activity of God is to be taken seriously, the relation of God to the system must be one of Transeunt Causality. But if Transeunt Causality is admitted in the single case of God’s attitude towards the monads, it no longer seems obvious why it should be denied as regards the attitudes of the monads among themselves. For there is now at least one property of each monad of which the ground lies not in itself but in God, namely, its actual existence;[[115]] and the principle that every monad is the ground of all its own properties once being deserted, there remains no further reason for denying interaction. If, on the other hand, we lay stress on the view that the harmony is no mere result of an arbitrary creative act, but is a property contained in the concept of the world of monads, thought of as merely possible, why may we not equally well think of a world of interacting and interconnected and therefore not ultimately independent things as possessing equal claims to realisation? The Pluralism of Leibnitz, from which his denial of Transeunt Causality logically follows, seems to rest upon nothing better than uncriticised prejudices.[[116]]
§ 12. We may briefly indicate the view as to the problem of Transeunt Causality which is involved in our discussion of the causal postulate. For any purpose for which it is possible and desirable to think of the world as a plurality of things, Transeunt Causality must be maintained. For precisely because the things in the world in the end form a connected system, the complete ground of the states of a thing cannot lie in itself but only in the whole system. In any sense in which there are a plurality of things, and in which the principle of ground and consequence can be approximately represented by the causal determination of subsequent occurrences by anterior occurrences, we must be prepared to find that the states of one thing appear among the conditions of the subsequent states of other things.
But again, since the apparently separate things are not entirely independent, but are the detailed self-expression of a single system, Transeunt Causality must in the end be appearance. Inasmuch as all interconnection between things depends upon their inclusion in the single system of Reality, it may be said that, when you take the whole into account, all Causality is ultimately immanent. But again, as we have already seen, Immanent Causality is an imperfect way of expressing the systematic connection of all existence according to the principle of Ground and Consequence. Fully thought out, Immanent Causality, as the determination of one state of the whole by a preceding state, is transformed into the concept of the interconnection of the various states by the purely logical principle that they form together the detailed expression of a single coherent principle of structure. And thus all Causality is finally imperfect appearance.
A point of some interest is the following. As we have seen, only individual experiences can in the end possess the kind of relative independence and internal unity which thought seeks to express in the notion of a thing. We may add that just in the degree to which any existence has this individuality, and thus forms a self-contained whole, will its behaviour have its ground within the thing itself. Hence the more completely individual a thing is, the more will the conditions upon which its states depend appear when we apply the postulate of Causality, to be included in other states of the same thing. Thus the more individuality a thing has, the more fully will it appear to exhibit Immanent as distinguished from Transeunt Causality in its internal structure, that is, the less will be the modifications that structure undergoes in its intercourse with other things. If we like to denote the maintenance of unchanged internal structure against instigations to change from without by the term “empirical activity,” we may express our result by saying that the more individual a thing is, the more empirically active it is.
When we come to deal with the special problems of moral and social life, we shall have to face further questions as to the connection of causal determination with moral freedom and responsibility, and again with conscious purposive action for ends. Our previous discussion will then be found to have cleared the way for these more complex questions, by removing the difficulties which arise when the causal postulate is mistaken for an axiomatic principle of the interpretation of the systematic nature of Reality.
Consult further:—B. Bosanquet, Essentials of Logic, pp. 164, 165; Logic, vol. i p. 253 ff., vol. ii. p. 212 ff.; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 5 (Motion and Change), 6 (Causation), 7 (Activity), 8 (Things); H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. i. chaps. 4 (Becoming and Change), 5 (Nature of Physical Action); L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, pt. 2, chaps. 8, 15 (for discussion of “Plurality” of Causes); Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, chaps. 3 and 4; B. Russell, Philosophy of Leibniz, chaps. 4, 11 (Pre-established Harmony); James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, pt. 1, lectures 2-6; Hume’s famous discussion of Causation (Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. 3, §§ 3-15) seems to me to have lost little of its value, and to be still perhaps the most important single contribution of modern Philosophy to the systematic discussion of Causality.
[100]. For a discussion of the same point in dealing with energy, see Professor Schuster, British Association Report, 1892, p. 631.
[101]. W. M‘Dougall in Mind for July 1902, p. 350.
[102]. See the admirable remarks of Bosanquet in Companion to Plato’s Republic, pp. 275, 276.