International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

It follows from this self-destruction of the empiristic causal hypothesis that an additional element of thought must be contained in the relation of cause and effect besides the elements of reproductive recognition and those of identification and discrimination, all of which are involved in the abstract comprehension of uniform sequence. The characteristics of the causal connection revealed by our previous analysis constitute the necessary and perhaps adequate conditions for combining the several factual perceptions into the abstract registering idea of uniform sequence. We may, therefore, expect to find that the element sought for lies in the tendency to extend the demand for causal connections over the entire field of possible experience; and perhaps we may at the same time arrive at the condition which led Hume and Mill to recognize the complete universality of the causal law in spite of the exclusively empirical content that they had ascribed to it. In this further analysis also we have to draw from the nature of our thought itself the means of guiding our investigation.

In the first place, all thought has a formal necessity which reveals itself in the general causal law no less than in every individual thought process, that is, in every valid judgment. The meaning of this formal necessity of thought is easily determined. If we presuppose, for example, that I recognize a surface which lies before me as green, then the perception judgment, "This surface is green," that is, the apprehension of the present perceptive content in the fundamental form of discursive thought, repeats with predicative necessity that which is presented to me in the content of perception. The necessity of thought contained in this perception judgment, as mutatis mutandis in every affirmative judgment meeting the logical conditions, is recognizable through the fact that the contradictory judgment, "This surface is not green," is impossible for our thought under the presupposition of the given content of perception and of our nomenclature. It contradicts itself. I can express the contradictory proposition, for instance, in order to deceive; but I cannot really pass the judgment that is contained in it. It lies in the very nature of our thought that the predicate of an assertive judgment call contain only whatever belongs as an element of some sort (characteristic, attribute, state, relation) to the subject content in the wider sense. The same formal necessity of thought, to give a further instance, is present in the thought process of mediate syllogistic predication. The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, for example, the judgment, "All bodies are divisible," from the propositions, "All bodies are extended," and, "Whatever is extended is divisible."

These elementary remarks are not superfluous; for they make clear that the casually expressed assertion of modern natural scientific empiricism, declaring in effect that there is no such thing as necessity of thought, goes altogether too far. Such necessity can have an admissible meaning only in so far as it denotes that in predicting or recounting the content of possible experience every hypothesis is possible for thought. Of course it is, but that is not the subject under discussion.

The recognition of the formal necessity of thought that must be presupposed helps us to define our present question; for it needs no proof that this formal necessity of thought, being valid for every affirmative judgment, is valid also for each particular induction, and again for the general causal law. If in the course of our perceptions we meet uniform sequences, then the judgment, "These sequences are uniform," comprehends the common content of many judgments with formal necessity of thought. Empiricism, too, does not seriously doubt that the hypothesis of a general functional, even though only temporal, relation between cause and effect is deduced as an expectation of possible experience with necessity from our real experience. It questions only the doctrine that the relation between the events regarded as cause and effect has any other than a purely empirical import. The reality of an event that is preceded and followed uniformly by no other remains for this view, as we have seen, a possibility of thought.

In opposition to empiricism, we now formulate the thesis to be established: Wherever two events a and b are known to follow one another uniformly and immediately, there we must require with formal necessity that some element in the preceding a be thought of as fundamental, which will determine sufficiently b's appearance or make that appearance necessary. The necessity of the relation between the events regarded as cause and effect is, therefore, the question at issue.

We must keep in mind from the very start that less is asserted in this formulation than we are apt to read into it. It states merely that something in a must be thought of as fundamental, which makes b necessary. On the other hand, it says nothing as to what this fundamental something is, or how it is constituted. It leaves entirely undecided whether or not this something that our thought must necessarily postulate is a possible content of perception or can become such, accordingly whether or not it can become an object of our knowledge, or whether or not it lies beyond the bounds of all our possible experience and hence all our possible knowledge. It contains nothing whatsoever that tells us how the determination of b takes place through a. The word "fundamental" is intended to express all this absence of determination.

Thus we hope to show a necessity of thought peculiar to the relation between cause and effect. This is the same as saying that our proof will establish the logical impossibility of the contradictory assertion; for the logical impossibility of the contradictory assertion is the only criterion of logical necessity. Thus the proof that we seek can be given only indirectly. In the course of this proof, we can disregard the immediacy of the constant sequence and confine our attention to the uniformity of the sequence, not only for the sake of brevity, but also because, as we have seen, we have the right to speak of near and remote causes. We may then proceed as follows.

If there is not something fundamental in a constant antecedent event a, which determines necessarily the constant subsequent appearance of one and the same b,—that is, if there is nothing fundamental which makes this appearance necessary,—then we must assume that also c or d ..., in short, any event you will, we dare not say "follows upon," but appears after a in irregular alternation with b. This assumption, however, is impossible for our thought, because it is in contradiction with our experience, on the basis of which our causal thought has been developed. Therefore the assumption of a something that is fundamental in a, and that determines sufficiently and necessarily the appearance of b, is a necessity for our thought.

The assertion of this logical impossibility (Denkunmöglichkeit) will at once appear thoroughly paradoxical. The reader, merely recalling the results of the empiristic interpretation given above, will immediately say: "The assumption that a b does not follow constantly upon an a, but that sometimes b, sometimes c, sometimes d ... irregularly appears, is in contradiction only with all our previous experience, but it is not on this account a logical impossibility. It is merely improbable." The reader will appeal especially to the discussion of Stuart Mill, already quoted, in which Mill pictures in concreto such an improbable logical impossibility, and therefore at the same time establishes it in fact. Again, the reader may bring forward the words in which Helmholtz introduces intellectual beings of only two dimensions. "By the much misused expression, 'to be able to imagine to one's self,' or, 'to think how something happens,' I understand (and I do not see how anybody can understand anything else thereby without robbing the expression of all meaning) that one can picture to one's self the series of sense impressions which one would have if such a thing actually took place in an individual case."[^[21]]

Nevertheless, pertinent as are these and similar objections, they are not able to stand the test. We ask: "Is in fact a world, or even a portion of our world, possible for thought that displays through an absolutely irregular alternation of events a chaos in the full sense; or is the attempt to picture such a chaos only a mere play of words to which not even our imagination, not to mention our thought, can give a possible meaning?"