Chapter II
CAUSAL JUDGMENTS
A Causal Judgment interprets and explains sense-perceptions. For instance, the tiny baby's first vague notion that something, no knowing what, must have caused the impressions of warmth and whiteness and roundness and smoothness that accompany the arrival of its milk-bottle—this is a causal judgment.
Elementary Conclusions
The very first conclusion that you form concerning any sensation that reaches you is that something produced it, though you may not be very clear as
to just what that something is. The conclusions of the infant mind, for example, along this line must be decidedly vague and indefinite, probably going no further than to determine that the cause is either inside or outside of the body. Even then its judgment may be far from sure.
First Effort of the Mind
Yet, baby or grown-up, young or old, the first effort of every human mind upon the receipt and perception of a sensation is to find out what produced it. The conclusion as to what did produce any particular sensation is plainly enough a judgment, and since it is a judgment determining the cause of the sensation, it may well be termed a causal judgment.
Causal judgments, taken by themselves,