Dissension and perplexity on the question. — What is a cause? revealed by the picture of Sokrates — no intuition to guide him.
When Sokrates here tells us that as a young man he felt anxious curiosity to know what the cause of every phenomenon was, it is plain that at this time he did not know what he was looking for: that he proceeded only by successive steps of trial, doubt, discovered error, rejection: and that each trial was adapted to the then existing state of his own mind. The views of Anaxagoras he affirms to have presented themselves to him as a new revelation: he then came to believe that the only true Cause was, a cosmical reason and volition like to that of which he was conscious in himself. Yet he farther tells us, that others did not admit this Cause, but found other causes to satisfy them: that even Anaxagoras did not follow out his own general conception, but recognised Causes quite unconnected with it: lastly, that neither could he (Sokrates) trace out the conception for himself.[74] He was driven to renounce it, and to turn to another sort of Cause — the hypothesis of self-existent Ideas, in which he then acquiesced. And this last hypothesis, again, was ultimately much modified in the mind of Plato himself, as we know from Aristotle. All this shows that the Idea of Cause — far from being one and the same to all, like the feeling of uneasiness which prompts the search for it — is complicated, diverse, relative, and modifiable.
[74] The view of Cause, which Sokrates here declares himself to renounce from inability to pursue it, is substantially the same as what he lays down in the Philêbus, pp. 23 D, 27 A, 30 E.
In the Timæus Plato assigns to Timæus the task (to which Sokrates in the Phædon had confessed himself incompetent) of following into detail the schemes and proceedings of the Demiurgic or optimising Νοῦς. But he also assumes the εἴδη or Ideas as co-ordinate and essential conditions.
Different notions of Plato and Aristotle about causation, causes regular and irregular. Inductive theory of causation, elaborated in modern times.
The last among the various revolutions which Sokrates represents himself to have undergone — the transition from designing and volitional agency of the Kosmos conceived as an animated system, to the sovereignty of universal Ideas — is analogous to that transition which Auguste Comte considers to be the natural progress of the human mind: to explain phenomena at first by reference to some personal agency, and to pass from this mode of explanation to that by metaphysical abstractions. It is true that these are two distinct modes of conceiving Causation; and that in each of them the human mind, under different states of social and individual instruction, finds satisfaction. But each of the two theories admits of much diversity in the mode of conception. Plato seems to have first given prominence to these metaphysical causes; and Aristotle in this respect follows his example: though he greatly censures the incomplete and erroneous theories of Plato. It is remarkable that both these two philosophers recognised Causes irregular and unpredictable, as well as Causes regular and predictable. Neither of them included even the idea of regularity, as an essential part of the meaning of Cause.[75] Lastly, there has been elaborated in modern times, owing to the great extension of inductive science, another theory of Causation, in which unconditional regularity is the essential constituent: recognising no true Causes except the phenomenal causes certified by experience, as interpreted inductively and deductively — the assemblage of phenomenal antecedents, uniform and unconditional, so far as they can be discovered and verified. Certain it is that these are the only causes obtainable by induction and experience: though many persons are not satisfied without looking elsewhere for transcendental or ontological causes of a totally different nature. All these theories imply — what Sokrates announces in the passage just cited — the deep-seated influence of speculative curiosity, or the thirst for finding the Why of things and events, as a feeling of the human mind: but all of them indicate the discrepant answers with which, in different enquirers, this feeling is satisfied, though under the same equivocal name Cause. And it would have been a proceeding worthy of Plato’s dialectic, if he had applied to the word Cause the same cross-examining analysis which we have seen him applying to the equally familiar words — Virtue — Courage — Temperance — Friendship, &c. “First, let us settle what a Cause really is: then, and not till then, can we succeed in ulterior enquiries respecting it.”[76]
[75] Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics, B. 1. ch. iv. p. 32. “Plato appears to have been the first of the Ionic School that introduced formal causes into natural philosophy. These he called Ideas, and made the principles of all things. And the reason why he insists so much upon this kind of cause, and so little upon the other three, is given us by Aristotle in the end of his first book of Metaphysics, viz., that he studied mathematics too much, and instead of using them as the handmaid of philosophy, made them philosophy itself.… Plato, however, in the Phædon says a good deal about final causes; but in the system of natural philosophy which is in the Timæus, he says very little of it.”
I have already observed that Plato in the Timæus (48 A) recognises erratic or irregular Causation — ἡ πλανωμένη αἰτία. Aristotle recognises Αἰτία among the equivocal words πολλαχῶς λεγόμενα; and he enumerates Τύχη and Αὐτόματον — irregular causes or causes by accident — among them (Physic. ii. 195-198; Metaphys. K. 1065, a.) Schwegler, ad Aristot. Metaphys. vi. 4, 3, “Das Zufällige ist ein nothwendiges Element alles Geschehens”. Alexander of Aphrodisias, the best of the Aristotelian commentators, is at pains to defend this view of Τύχη — Causation by accident, or irregular.
Proklus, in his Commentary on the Timæus (ii. 80-81, p. 188, Schneider), notices the labour and prolixity with which the commentators before him set out the different varieties of Cause; distinguishing sixty-four according to Plato, and forty-eight according to Aristotle. Proklus adverts also (ad Timæum, iii. p. 176) to an animated controversy raised by Theophrastus against Plato, about Causes and the speculations thereupon.
An enumeration, though very incomplete, of the different meanings assigned to the word Cause, may be seen in Professor Fleming’s Vocabulary of Philosophy.