"Causation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beliefs of memory precede the use of language, and therefore are originally purely instinctive, and independent of any rational justification, should have been of great importance to Hume, from its bearing upon his theory of causation; and it is curious that he has not adverted to it, but always takes the trustworthiness of memories for granted. It may be worth while briefly ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... "No sensation or causation in matter; but I think that is answered the same way as the other. But this last one; I do wonder if the Bible corroborates it?" Kate looked troubled again, as she read: "'There is ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... virtue is found in the creature's conforming his will to that of his Maker; this is the trait of the angels who were steadfast in their faith. How can you here couple fatality and will? If ours be a state of probation, it is only by a certain freedom of action, an originating power of causation in ourselves, that we can conceive of our being put to proof. Possibly, in fallen man, that freedom is limited to the power of rejecting or yielding to the influences of grace. Yet within that narrow range it may be still a perfect ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... to the common observer unconnected, are inevitably consequent the one to the other. It remains to the philosopher to discover these mysterious affinities, and it is the proudest triumph of his skill to detect and drag forth some latent chain of causation, which at first sight appears a paradox to the inexperienced observer. Thus many of my readers will doubtless wonder what connection the family of Noah can possibly have with this history; and many will stare when informed that ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge":[64] our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... alternation were to cease, we might have either day or night unfollowed by one another. There are thus two kinds of uniformities of succession, the one unconditional, the other conditional on the first: laws of causation, and other successions dependent on those laws. All ultimate laws are laws of causation, and the only universal law beyond the pale of mathematics is the law of universal causation, namely, that every ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... different with another of these earliest settlements, which deserves especial mention as coming directly in the line of causation which led to the founding of Massachusetts by Puritans. For some years past the Dorchester adventurers—a small company of merchants in the shire town of Dorset—had been sending vessels to catch fish off the New England coast. In 1623 these ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... begin to reason, punishment affects them in a different manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. They distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation; they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause, frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that the will is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by circumstances, by passions, by persuasion, by caprice. It must be, however, by slow degrees, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... from standing upon my head—which was the immediate causation of your correspondence about the co-extension Imperialis Academia Caesariana Naturae Curiosum (don't I know their thundering long title well!)—I have to say that I was born on the 4th of May of the year 1825, whereby I have now more or less mis-spent ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... natural phenomena, the relation of the Son to the Father, that is, the manner in which the Son was begotten, the way in which matter was created, the cause of evil. In opposition to the claim to absolute knowledge, i.e., to the complete discovery of all the processes of causation, which Irenaeus too alone regards as knowledge, he indeed pointed out the limits of our perception, supporting his statement by Bible passages. But the ground of these limits, "ex parte accepimus gratiam," is not an ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out his own ideas. Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him speak as ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... two more days of this inexplicable content. Then came the thunder-storm. It was, perhaps, the thunder-storm that really deserves the blame for Missy's climactic athletic catastrophe. No lightning-bolt struck, yet that thunder-storm indubitably played its part in Missy's athletic destiny. It was the causation of renewed turmoil after time ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... useful to the will is the knowledge that a given effect is produced by a certain cause. Genius itself is a kind of knowledge, namely, of ideas; and it is a knowledge which is unconcerned with any principle of causation. The man who is devoted to knowledge of this character is not employed in the business of the will. Nay, every man who is devoted to the purely objective contemplation of the world (and it is this that is meant ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,—its cardinal idea,—that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... taught that as often as certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it remained for Darwin to accumulate proof that there is no break between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work of evolution, and not of ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... with nothing but 'ideas,' and the ideas are naturally 'subjective' and therefore in some sense unreal. Finally Hume gets rid of the soul as well as the outside world; and then, by his theory of 'causation,' shows that the ideas themselves are independent atoms, cohering but not rationally connected, and capable of being arbitrarily joined or separated in any way whatever. Thus the ideas have ousted the facts. We cannot get ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... entrance into existence, and an exit thence; the Theist is, therefore, perfectly justified in regarding it as disqualified for self-existence, and in passing behind it for the Supreme Entity that needs no cause. Phenomena demand causation, entities dispense with it. No one asks for a cause of the space which contains the universe, or of the Eternity on the bosom of which it floats. Everywhere the line is necessarily drawn upon ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its manifestation on particular molecular arrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and, wherever he extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... what is to be. In the latter case all devices of magic and sorcery are of the highest value to men. This is why magic is so ultimate and original in the history of civilization. It teaches men not to look for any rational causation in the order of things, and to believe in the efficacy of ritual proceedings which contain no rational relation of means to ends. Then it costs no effort to believe that one person can bewitch another, and do it unconsciously. Any relation of responsibility can be invented and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Sanscrit term for that great Law known to Western thinkers as Spiritual Cause and Effect, or Causation. It relates to the complicated affinities for either good or evil that have been acquired by the soul throughout its many incarnations. These affinities manifest as characteristics enduring from one incarnation to another, being added to here, softened or altered ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... really succeeded in deceiving themselves so far as to believe that they could logically hold to it; but I declare that they have never succeeded in convincing any unprejudiced mind, and I defy any logician to prove that the conclusion of free will as consistent with eternal causation, is less absurd than that two and two ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... have. For example, if we are dealing with pure number, as in arithmetic, we have an object which is somehow native to our thought, commensurate with it, or however you like to put it; and it is the same with other abstract notions, such as substance and causation." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... love and absolute omniscience? Is prayer really a power with God, or is it merely an expedient by which our own piety may be cultivated? Is it not merely a power (that is, a stated antecedent accompanied by the idea of causation), but is it a transcendent power, accomplishing what no other power can, over-ruling all other agencies, and rendering them subservient to its own wonderful efficiency? I think there are few devout readers of the Bible to whom these questions ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... removing any possible misconception about the scope of these proceedings. They are not proceedings in which this Court can adjudicate on the causes of the disaster. The question of causation is obviously a difficult one, as shown by the fact that the Commissioner and the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in his report came to different conclusions on it. But it is not this Court's concern now. This is not an appeal. Parties to hearings ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... history. No accident can disturb or thwart it; for, in truth, there can be no such thing as accident, except in our imaginations, and by reason of our incapacity to trace the continuous thread of inevitable sequence, or causation, which connects together all events whatever, in their inception, through their continuance, and to their end. All enlightened thinkers of the present age have recognized this great truth; and yet none have been able ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... designed for the use of students; it was based on J. S. Mill, but differed from him in many particulars, and had as distinctive features the treatment of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in connexion with causation and the detailed application of the principles of logic to the various sciences. His services to education in Scotland were now recognized by the conferment of the honorary degree of doctor of laws by the university ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... from all his works, and yet acting in them. This doctrine has been held by the greatest thinkers the world has ever produced, such as Descartes, Lerbrisky, Berkeley, Herschel, Faraday, and a multitude of others." "It seems to be required," says Dr. McCosh, "by that deep law of causation which not only prompts us to seek for a law in everything but an adequate cause, to be found only in an intelligent mind." "Our greatest American thinker, Jonathan Edwards," says Dr. McCosh, (whom I can claim as my predecessor,) "maintains ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... organization, consists in that sort of growth which is peculiar to organized life. Thirdly, the definition involves a still more egregious flaw in the reasoning, namely, that of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (or the assumption of causation from mere coexistence); and this, too, in its very worst form. For it is not cum hoc solo, ergo propter hoc, which would in many cases supply a presumptive proof by induction, but cum hoc, et plurimis aliis, ergo propter hoc! Shell, of some kind or other, is common to the whole ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cannot create anything without at the same time creating its relation to everything else, just as in painting a landscape, the contour you give to the trees will determine that of the sky. Therefore, whenever you create anything, you thereby start a train of causation, which will work out in strict accordance with the sort of thought that started it. The stream always has the quality of its source. Thought which is in line with the Unity of the Great Whole, will produce correspondingly ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... exactly, word for word, what we have just said of the imagination. This is unnecessary. Back of both, then, we have our true cause, whatever may be our opinion concerning the ultimate nature of causation and of will. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of the fundamental physiological, chemical and embryonic causes from which, in their appointed order those various organs are evolved;—first the brain and nervous system, afterwards the tissues and the bones. Thus, unversed in the deeper phases of causation, men are hurried unprepared into ranks of a noble profession to struggle as best they may, through lack of deeper knowledge, with the serious symptoms of disease—at first by rote but later, are tempted to tamper empirically with ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... old feeling that a dignified product of creation ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something supernatural; ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... irritation of the cerebral plasma itself, let us now consider how these morbid factors are most scientifically and speedily met at the bedside; and how, more particularly, those distressing conditions of engorgement, which are so baneful an item in the causation of a certain form of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... organization and irresponsible leadership outside Parliament. Is it possible that the dangers may be avoided and the requisites secured by a change in electoral machinery? Those who have no conception of the working of social forces, and who do not trace the law of causation into the realm of mind, will be inclined to scoff at the suggestion. To them the only hope of improvement lies in appealing to the people to elect better men. They ignore entirely the reciprocal relation of the Parliament ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... discusses the underlying concepts, consists of three parts: physics, anthropology, and politics. Even the theory of the state is capable of demonstrative treatment; moral phenomena are as subject to the law of mechanical causation as physical phenomena. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Their task of observation of symptoms, of the separation of the essentials from the accidents of disease, and of generalization from experience could go on unaffected by any view of the nature of man and of the world. Even treatment, which must almost of necessity be based on some theory of causation, was little deflected by a view of elements and humours on which it was impossible to act directly, while therapeutics was further safeguarded from such influence by the doctrine of Nature as the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... are practically insoluble in water under any circumstances. We now arrive at the important result known to chemists as the precipitation of insoluble compounds from solutions. In order to define this result, however, we must, of course, first consider the circumstances of causation of the result. Let us take a simple case of chemical decomposition resulting in the deposition or precipitation of a substance from solution in the insoluble state. We will take a salt you are probably ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... been of interest, not only to the student of medicine, but to the lay-observer as well. In olden times there were many opinions concerning its causation, all of which, until the era of physiologic investigation, were of superstitious derivation. Believing menstruation to be the natural means of exit of the feminine bodily impurities, the ancients always thought a menstruating woman was to be shunned; ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... relation between the self in effort and the not-self in response more satisfactorily than the rag doll; and the manifest glee over the contortions of the playful father whose hand is slapped is not innate cruelty but the delight of successful experiment in causation. ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... of the sorcerers would make a Mekeo native unwilling to do so. The Mafulu sorcerers are a somewhat less powerful people; but they claim, and are supposed to have, certain powers of divination, or actual causation, or both, of certain things. So far as I could learn, the sorcerer's supernatural powers would never be exercised in a hostile way against anyone of his own village, or indeed of his own clan, or even, as a rule, of his own community. Apparently the sorcerer's victim is nearly always a member of ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... Notwithstanding the fact that they are regarded as being different, and that the treatment and symptoms of the two conditions vary widely, there can be no doubt that certain depressing influences, in every way similar, play an important part in their causation. ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... going to do in that particular gallery, and secretly doubting whether it had known its own mind, and gone thither with the full knowledge and permission of its maternal relative. Indeed, the good Doctor would probably have ascribed its presence to the malicious and personal causation of the devil, but that the one point on which he and Spluethner were agreed was the ignoring of unscientific hypotheses. The Doctor's objections to the devil were none the less strenuous ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... chapters have been added with a view to affording some information, first, as to the conditions under which a great part of the surgical work was done, and, secondly, as to the mechanism and causation of the injuries, which would not readily be at hand in the case of the general surgical reader. For much of the information contained in Chapter II. I must express my indebtedness to the work of MM. Nimier and Laval, ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... ask ourselves whether any amount of evidence which the nature of our faculties permits us to attain, can justify us in asserting that any phenomenon is out of the reach of natural causation. To this end it is obviously necessary that we should know all the consequences to which all possible combinations, continued through unlimited time, can give rise. If we knew these, and found none ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And wherever the seat of real causality is, as ultimately known 'for true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other nature of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we mean by working, tho we may later come to learn that working was ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... such a simple mechanical causation as the production by the sun, of a rarefied atmosphere, the colder air rushing in from all sides into the empty spaces, we should hardly expect to find any definite currents bounded by well-defined limits; much less should we look for transverse and opposite currents going ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... of the commonest of sexual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor Freud, with his bold and original views on the sexual causation of many abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-analytic method of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no means universally accepted, is yet exerting a ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... part, or merely to their presence, or to some strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the meeting of a magpie at setting out ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation, Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these well-matched antagonists, the man of wealth and station utilizing all the advantages granted him by the state of society to crush his enemy. Godwin, then, was justified in declaring ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... inestimable "System of Logic" was a revolution. It hardly needs, of course, to be said that he owed much to his predecessors,—that he borrowed from Whewell much of his classification, from Brown the chief lines of his theory of causation, from Sir John Herschel the main principles of the inductive methods. Those who think this a disparagement of his work must have very little conception of the mass of original thought that still remains to Mr. Mill's credit, the great critical ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... by the fact that she did not seem to be appealing to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear—in thus picking up the threads of her past—to be consciously accounting for her present. She recognized no causation there. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... inquiry was more minute and the degrees of consanguinity were specified. Mr. Huth quotes some of the figures for these years, probably derived from the same sources as Table XXVI, and comments as follows: "An examination of this table will show that the statistics so much relied upon as proving the causation of deaf-mutism by consanguineous marriages show nothing of the sort. In 1871 fourth cousins produced more deaf-mutes per marriage than any nearer relationship. In 1881 third cousins produced more than any nearer relationship."[83] Mr. Huth ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... vanquished, and at this point, the curtain ought to ring down and leave the audience to imagine the Red-cross knight and his ladye-love living happy for ever afterwards. But in history no climax is more than an incident; at the most it is but the decisive entry on a new phase. The chain of causation, of the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... healing which I afterwards named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... topic. To us, instead of being a mere prelude to more serious matters, or the last resort of a feeble intellect, it was the all-engrossing theme. The man with the latest hare-brained theory of the causation of the wind was accorded a full hearing. The lightning calculator who estimated the annual tonnage of drift-snow sweeping off Adelie Land was received as a futurist and thinker. Discussion was always free, and the subject was never thrashed out. Evidence on the great topic accumulated day ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to 170:24 human progress. The age seems ready to approach this subject, to ponder somewhat the supremacy of Spirit, and at least to touch the hem ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... direct intention; a chance that which happens without any known cause. If the direct cause of a railroad accident is known, we can not call it a chance. To the theist there is, in strictness, no chance, all things being by divine causation and control; but chance is spoken of where no special cause is manifest: "By chance there came down a certain priest that way," Luke x, 31. We can speak of a game of chance, but not of a game of accident. An incident is viewed as occurring in the regular course of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... of the geographical distributions of peoples over the earth—all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... is some appearance of loss of simplicity, but the gain is real. As was said above, the time is not ripe for the discussion of the origin of species. With faith in Evolution unshaken—if indeed the word faith can be used in application to that which is certain—we look on the manner and causation of adapted differentiation as still wholly mysterious. As Samuel Butler so truly said: "To me it seems that the 'Origin of Variation,' whatever it is, is the only true 'Origin of Species,'"[74] and of that Origin not one of us knows anything. But given Variation—and it is given: ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... will be able to understand the law of causality and the chain of existence, on which he himself meditated a whole night after his enlightenment, and his discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted processes, in which the connection between one generation and another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... elevate that of fancy. The origin of aestheticism is the same as that of mysticism. Both proceed from a rebellion against the predominance of the abstract sciences and against the undue abuse of the principle of causation in metaphysic. When we pass from the stuffed animals of the zoological museums, from anatomical reconstructions, from tables of figures, from classes and sub-classes constituted by means of abstract characters, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... within the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on falling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking—persistent, destructive ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... of art. And the Wise Men of the East owed their instruction to a star, which is rightly observed by Gregory the Great in favour of astrology. And Albertus Magnus makes it the most valuable science, because, says he, it teaches us to consider the causation of causes, ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... considered. Lamarck assumed that the external conditions directly affected the organisms in [448] such a way as to make them better adapted to life, under prevailing circumstances. Nageli gave to this conception the name "Theory of direct causation" (Theorie der directen Bewirkung), and it has received the approval of Von Wettstein, Strasburger and other German investigators. According to this conception a plant, when migrating from lowlands into the mountains would slowly be changed ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... the book De Synod., it is said: "If anyone say that the Son was made by the Will of God, as a creature is said to be made, let him be anathema." The reason of this is that will and nature differ in their manner of causation, in such a way that nature is determined to one, while the will is not determined to one; and this because the effect is assimilated to the form of the agent, whereby the latter acts. Now it is manifest that of one thing there is only one natural form ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... v. tr., to help; dau fafi, to help, to surround; 2. prep, concerning, causation; ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... to the body of the fish by a broad base. A few minims of chloroform injected hypodermatically rendered the animal anaesthetic, and I could then proceed at my leisure, without being inconvenienced by its movements. The causation of tinctumutation is now definitely known. The theory that light acts directly on the chromatophoric cells has been proved to be incorrect. Even the theory that light occasions pigmentation is no longer tenable. I have, time and again, reared tadpoles from the eggs in total ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... on Objects of Terror, which precedes Montmorenci, a Fragment, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is "excited by the interference of a simple, material causation," and which "requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure." He condemns Walpole's Mysterious Mother on the ground that the catastrophe is only productive of horror ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... uses his pretty little paws as veritable hands, by which he can grasp a nut or fruit all round, and so gain in his small mind a clear conception of its true shape and properties. Throughout the animal kingdom generally, indeed, this correspondence, or rather this chain of causation, makes itself everywhere felt; no high intelligence without a highly developed prehensile ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns up for which he cannot find a place, he sends it to the ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such that at any given moment the entire future is absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the stuff of which our bodies are ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and television have been the subject of expert appraisal in many countries. The Committee has made its recommendations in this section of the report fully aware that many authorities can describe these matters as no more than secondary influences in the causation of juvenile delinquency. ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... conservation of virtue should carefully study the causation of vice. In dealing with the red-light district, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To remove the causes which produce courtesans were a nobler work than to drag debased womanhood out of the depths. Doubtless the Rescuers imagine they ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... "sin": that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who demands—in place ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... the good of man. That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly developed. People nowadays do not delight in the Marvellous according to the old childlike spirit. They say in one breath, "Very extraordinary!" and in the next breath ask, "How do you account for it?" If the Author of this work has presumed ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... then, the origination of a variety requires and presupposes Divine power. And so between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical conception of the other no contrariety remains. "A proper view of the nature of causation.... places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[9] A true and worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... religion, codes of ethics and schools of art are, in the last analysis, just as much products of material causes as are boots or sausages. There are some intellectual Socialists whose mode of life has shielded them from the discipline of the Machine Process—the inexorable inculcator of causation—who attempt to place religion and ethics and other ideological phenomena in a separate category not to be accounted for by the materialistic conception of history. These may turn to Marx and weary their auditors by their iteration of "Lord! Lord!" but verily ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... brightness of the face she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... variations.' {56} But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... indeterminism? The answer is (a) that every choice is certainly the result of an efficient cause; but (b) the fact of this being so interferes in no wise with the reality of liberty, nor does it contradict the universality of the law of causation. For the efficient cause is the man himself, and the fact that he can choose is attested in the very act of choice—which would not be "choice" if there were not at least two real alternatives. We do not quarrel with the obvious ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; but she was intolerant of any attempt to determine the causation of her favorite causes, and she derided the modern doctrines of evolution and inherent force as atheistic because materialistic. The two words meant the same thing with her; and the more shadowy and unintelligible people made the causa ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... they are secondary. About these anthropo-geography can reach surer conclusions than regarding direct psychical effects, because it can trace their mode of operation as well as define the result. Direct psychical effects are more matters of conjecture, whose causation is asserted rather than proved. They seem to float in the air, detached from the solid ground under foot, and are therefore subject matter for the psychologist rather than ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the principle of continued uniformity of sequence our whole belief of causation, and consequently of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... science than without it. Who ever urged the contrary, that was worth listening to? I believe the human race will be more and more unhappy as science grows. But am I on that account likely to preach a crusade against it? Sister mine, we are what we are; we think and speak and do what causation determines. If you can still hold another belief, do so, and be thrice blessed. I would so gladly ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... first objection is that they are against law; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law can only prevent miracles by compelling and making necessary the succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary connection ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... for further research surpassing the wildest dreams of astrologers and alchemists of old, there has been an unmistakable tendency to push the Divine agency farther and farther back in the chain of phenomenal causation, until it would appear that it had been finally thrust out of the world altogether. "I have swept the heavens with my telescope," said Lalande, "and I have not found your God." "The heavens are telling no more the glory of God," said Auguste Comte, "but that of Herschel and Laplace." ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... development of their ideas and life must be considered farther on, referred in a discourse of about forty years ago to three distinct stages in Unitarian theology. First, he pointed to the significance of the struggle for the principle of 'Unity in the Divine causation,' as against a doctrine which, as Unitarians maintain, endeavours in vain by words to prevent a triplicity of 'Persons' from sliding into a group of three Divine Beings. This struggle marks in great part the whole track by ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... great interest with which I have at last slowly read the whole of your work.... I never in my life read so lucid an expositor (and therefore thinker) as you are; and I think that I understand nearly the whole, though perhaps less clearly about cosmic theism and causation than other parts. It is hopeless to attempt out of so much to specify what has interested me most, and probably you would not care to hear. It pleased me to find that here and there I had arrived, from my own crude thoughts, at some of the same ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... of the force called gravitation, we virtually surrendered ourselves to the enemy, and started upon a road, the road of natural causation, that traverses the whole system of created things. We cannot turn back; we may lie down by the roadside and dream our old dreams, but our children and their children will press on, and will be exhilarated by ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... till I was a young man, at college, that I got any clew to the significance of my dreams, and to the cause of them. Up to that time they had been meaningless and without apparent causation. But at college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange mental states and experiences. For instance, there was the falling-through-space dream—the commonest dream experience, one practically ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... to them—namely, unconscious modifications of the nerves. It may well be believed that the apparently suppressed links in a chain of association, those which Sir W. Hamilton considers as latent, really are so: that they are not even momentarily felt, the chain of causation being continued only physically—by one organic state of the nerves succeeding another so rapidly, that the state of mental consciousness appropriate ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... of Nature. Whatever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... elysium of beauty and plenty in which he finds himself? Alas! facts prove, however, that all things are transitory, and that change of condition is the constant and necessary result of that motion which is the chief instrument of eternal causation, but which, in causing all phenomena, wears out existing organizations while it is generating new ones. In the motions of the earth as a planet, doubtless are to be discovered the superior causes which convert seas into continents, and continents into seas. These sublime ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... modifications which shall make them essentially different from what they were in the beginning, or are now. This is not only true of the "germs" that are "in themselves upon the earth," but of every living thing, whether lying within or beyond the telescopic or microscopic limits. As a law of causation, as well as of consecutive thought, there must be in the order of life (all life) a continuous chain of ideas linking the past to the present, the present to the future, and the future to eternity. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... book, though not astonishing, like Sir William Hamilton's, is sufficient and always at the author's service. The text throughout, and especially the notes on Causation, Predestination, Original Sin, and Necessary Truths, will amply support our opinion. But better than either learning or logic is that noble and devout spirit pervading every page, and convincing the reader, that, whether the system advanced be true or false, it is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... therefore, is to discover how to arrange things in such an order as to set in motion a train of causation that will harmonize our own conditions without antagonizing the exercise of a like power by others. This therefore means that all individual exercise of this power is the particular application of a universal power which itself operates creatively on its own account independently ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and that many married couples in all walks of life whose sex relationships are unsatisfactory, nevertheless maintain the fabric of family life and support and bring up their children with an average degree of success. None of these three factors alone will serve, therefore, as a fundamental causation unit in desertion. Many statistical attempts have been made to study the causes of desertion, and to assign to each its mathematical percentage of influence. The report of a court of domestic relations gives such an analysis ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... aspects of our experience which we are accustomed to regard as real—qualities of things, the relations between things, the things themselves, space, time, motion, causation, activity, the self—turn out when carefully examined to be self-contradictory and absurd. They are not real; ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... This comparison is true in so far as the devil is somewhat the cause of our sins, even as God is in a certain way the cause of our good actions, but does not extend to the mode of causation: for God causes good things in us by moving the will inwardly, whereas the devil cannot move us ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... subject, and the perpetual growth and evolution of the thoughts, one generating, and explaining, and justifying, the place of another, not, as it is in Seneca, where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely strung together like beads, without any causation or progression. The words are selected because they are the most appropriate, regard being had to the dignity of the total impression, and no merely big phrases are used where plain ones would have sufficed, even in the most learned ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... reasoning occur in dealing with the matter reasoned about; but I find that a pure science of relation has a necessary place in the system of knowledge, and that the formulae known as laws of contradiction, syllogism and causation are useful guides in the framing and testing of arguments and experiments concerning matters of fact. Incisive criticism of traditionary doctrines, with some remarkable reconstructions, may be read in ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... whether the Old Testament at large is not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically, by "natural causes"; including a causation by ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... chole], bile, and [Greek: rheein], to flow), the name given to two distinct forms of disease, simple cholera and malignant cholera. Although essentially different both as to their causation and their pathological relationships, these two diseases may in individual cases present ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... sees how hopeless is the task. He becomes a pessimist: in Roman language, he despairs of the Republic. He is a lonely spirit, religious even in his anti-religionism, full of reverence, but ignorant what to worship; a splendid poet, feeding his spirit on the husks of mechanical causation. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... is the degree to which we apprehend that endless chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which each phenomenon comprehended, and therefore man's every action, must have its definite place as a result of what has gone before and as a cause of what ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... as given by Kane, Gelis, Pereira, and others, he discussed the subject of decolorisation of weak infusions of orchil and litmus by exclusion of atmospheric air, and by various deoxidising agents, and the different theories as to the causation of this phenomenon. "I have repeatedly had occasion to notice that, when weak infusions of these substances are excluded for some time from atmospheric air, in a bottle, with a tightly fitting cork, they gradually lose color, but rapidly regain it on re-exposure. It is curious that both orchil ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... spoken of it, nor thought of it for a long time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart from possible "telepathic" causation, completely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the prosperity of Mrs. Harmon would convince the most negative of agnostics that there was an overruling Providence, if nothing else did," said Sewell. "It's so defiant of all law, so delightfully independent of causation." ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... as we know it under what we call inanimate forms, is a gradual descent in the scale of intelligence from that mode of being which is able to realize its own will-power as a capacity for originating new trains of causation to that mode of being which is incapable of recognizing itself at all. The higher the grade of life, the higher the intelligence; from which it follows that the supreme principle of Life must also be the ultimate principle of intelligence. This is clearly demonstrated by the grand natural order ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... nothing but well- authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which they force upon the mind. But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge of the remoter links in the chain of causation. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Buddhas, that is, "singly enlightened," or beings in the middle state, who must extract the seeds or causes of actions, and must meditate on the twelve chains of causation, or understand the non-eternity of the world, while gazing upon the falling flowers or leaves. They attain enlightenment after four births or a hundred kalpas, according to ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... nearer to accomplishment than he found it; and if in the end freedom and prosperity come to a united Ireland, they will be found to proceed—however deeply overlaid by years and by events may be the chain of causation—from the action which John Redmond took in August 1914, and upon which his brother, with a legion like him, set the ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... investigation of acute infectious diseases occurring on the Island of Cuba. The board consists of Carroll, yourself, Lazear and the writer. It will be our duty, under verbal instructions from the Surgeon General, to continue the investigation of the causation of yellow fever. The Surgeon General expects us to make use of your laboratory at Military Hospital No. 1 and Lazear's laboratory at ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... had in all my life was caused by these same inoffensive, innocent quadrupeds. It was not inflicted on me by a ram, which is occasionally bellicose, but by ewes with their lambs, and I distinctly remember being as surprised as if the sky had fallen or something utterly opposed to all causation had confronted me. I want to meet a man, even of approved courage, who would not be shocked into fair fright by having half-a-dozen ewes suddenly turn and charge him with the fury of a bullock's mad onset. Would he not gasp, be stricken dumb, and look ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... both of these respects, without its being in any way deducible that they are not parts of the external world with which physics deals. Similar remarks will apply to the word "independent." Most of the associations of this word are bound up with ideas as to causation which it is not now possible to maintain. A is independent of B when B is not an indispensable part of the cause of A. But when it is recognised that causation is nothing more than correlation, and that there are correlations ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... serviceability in the complex industrial processes of today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension and adaptation is what is lacking ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... draws his ideas of natural causation from observation of himself. Hence he explains the phenomena of nature by supposing that they are produced by beings like himself. These beings may be called spirits or gods of nature to distinguish them ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... objection against the Lutheran theory of justification is that it disregards the law of causation. According to Luther a man is justified by the firm belief and trust that his sins are forgiven. This "belief" is either true or false. If it is false, I can have no certainty with regard to my salvation, but am deceiving myself. If true, it presupposes that ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... emergency; exigency, crisis, pinch, pass, push; occurrence; turning point. bearings, how the land lies. surroundings, context, environment 232; location 184. contingency, dependence (uncertainty) 475; causation 153, attribution 155. Adj. circumstantial; given, conditional, provisional; critical; modal; contingent, incidental; adventitious &c (extrinsic) 6; limitative^. Adv. in the circumstances, under the circumstances &c n., the circumstances, conditions &c 7; thus, in such wise. accordingly; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... attributed to the pressure of some hard object on the palm of the hand—such as a hammer or shovel or whip—its greater frequency in those who do no manual work, and the fact that it is very often bilateral, indicate that the constitutional factor is the more important in its causation. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... as we have seen, had introduced the idea of there being a natural order in social circumstances, that order being natural which is most advantageous to mankind. Turgot had declared that one age is bound to another by a chain of causation. Condorcet fused these two conceptions. He viewed the history of the ages as a whole, and found in their succession a natural order; an order which, when uninterrupted and undisturbed, tended to accumulate untold advantages upon the human race, which was every ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... underlying the world of phenomena, or an universal process, carried on in and by the changes of things. Hence, as Aristotle said of the Eleatics, that, by asserting all things to be one, they annihilated causation, which is the production of one thing from another, so it may be said of the various schools of Pantheism, that, by maintaining all things to be God, they evade rather than solve the great problem of philosophy, that of the relation between God and His creatures. ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... school about a century later, was one of those remarkable men whose ideas are centuries ahead of their time. This was particularly true of Paul in regard to surgery, and his attitude towards the supernatural in the causation and treatment of diseases. He was essentially a surgeon, being particularly familiar with military surgery, and some of his descriptions of complicated and difficult operations have been little improved upon even in modern times. In his books he describes such operations as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... can doubt but causation has the same influence as the other two relations of resemblance and contiguity. Superstitious people are fond of the reliques of saints and holy men, for the same reason, that they seek after types or images, in order to enliven their devotion, and give them a more intimate ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... the argument of Simmias, has been happily disposed of; and now an answer has to be given to the Theban Cadmus. Socrates recapitulates the argument of Cebes, which, as he remarks, involves the whole question of natural growth or causation; about this he proposes to narrate his own mental experience. When he was young he had puzzled himself with physics: he had enquired into the growth and decay of animals, and the origin of thought, until at last he began to doubt the self-evident fact that growth is the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my thoughts for the principal chapters of what I afterwards published on the Logic of the Moral Sciences; and my new position in respect to ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... an isolated fact, the responsibility of which began and ended with the individual transgressor; he saw it as a part of a vast network and entanglement, and traced the lines of influence converging upon it in the underworld of causation. Hence the wrong and discord which pained him called out pity, rather than indignation. The first inquiry which they awakened was addressed to his own conscience. How far am I in thought, word, custom, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... know the whole before we can rightly estimate a part. And looking back where some light seems to rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to what seems (but only seems) to be trivial, and is certainly obscure. Let us take the most remarkable instance of all,—the Christ, whom no scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,—who, whatever else he was, must be admitted even by unbelief to have ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... and morbid matter in blood and tissues creates the great majority of all diseases arising within the human organism. This will be explained fully in the following chapters which deal with the causation of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... if there is really any such thing as chance. Philosophy answers, in conformity with Aristotle's definition (Phys., II. iv.), that chance is merely relative to human purpose, and that what seems fortuitous really depends on a more subtle form of causation.—CH. II. Has man, then, any freedom, if the reign of law is thus absolute? Freedom of choice, replies Philosophy, is a necessary attribute of reason. Man has a measure of freedom, though a less perfect freedom than divine natures.—CH. III. But how can man's freedom be reconciled with God's absolute ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the less absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how, he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will except by conceiving it as se finiens, predetermining itself to the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility of conceiving of Will except as se finiens is his very ground for rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... announced. Her discovery was first called, "The Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing." Afterward she selected the name Christian Science. It is based upon what is held to be scientific certainty, namely,—that all causation is of Mind, every effect has its origin in desire and thought. The theology—if we may use the word—of Christian Science is contained in the volume entitled "Science and Health with Key to ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... likewise revealed very interesting facts concerning the sexual instinct of these animals. Freud was led to make certain assertions from his painfully acquired experience, such as the unfailing sexual agency in the causation of neurotic manifestations, and that his experience of many years has as yet shown no exception to this rule, which quite naturally provoked a good deal of bitter and fanatic criticism not only from lay people but ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... validity of the argument now under consideration is inversely proportional to the number of possibilities there are of the aspirations in question being due to the agency of physical causes; and forasmuch as our ignorance of psychological causation is well-nigh total, the Law of Parcimony forbids us to allow any determinate degree of logical value to the present argument. In other words, we must not use the absence of knowledge as equivalent to its presence—must not argue from our ignorance of ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... man's subjective consciousness makes it a reality for him. What is needed, therefore, is to establish the conception that external acts are NOT the only causative power, but that there is another law of causation, namely, that of pure Thought. This is the Law of Faith, the Law of Liberty; for it introduces us to a power which is able to inaugurate a new sequence of causation not related ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... If men are compelled by the force of circumstances, or by any force, to move only in one direction, they cannot be responsible for not moving in a different direction. Nor is it more to the purpose to undertake a subtle analysis of the nature of causation, and to explain that it does not, properly speaking, involve compulsion, but simply means invariable antecedence. Let it be that a cannon-ball does not really knock down the wall against which it strikes, and that it would be more correct to say that the ball impinges and ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Rebirth coupled with its companion law, the law of Causation does that. When we die after one life, we return to earth later, under circumstances determined by the manner in which we lived before. The gambler is drawn to pool parlors and race tracks to associate with others ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... heat as the cause of molecular change, (6) the law of gravitation as caused by the quality that inheres in earth-atoms to give them their attractive power or downward pull, (7) the kinetic nature of all energy; causation as always rooted in an expenditure of energy or a redistribution of motion, (8) universal dissolution through the disintegration of atoms, (9) the radiation of heat and light rays, infinitely small particles, darting forth in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to doubt that birds could worry people so, But, bless him! since I ate the bird, I guess I ought to know! The acidous condition of my stomach, so he said, Bespoke a vinous irritant that amplified my head, And, ergo, the causation of the thing, as he inferred, Was the large cold bottle, not the ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... observed results. We do not know the natural causes of many diseases; but yet no one nowadays thinks of reverting to any hypothesis of a supernatural cause, in order to explain the occurrence of any disease the natural causation of which is obscure. The science of medicine being in so many cases able to explain the occurrence of disease by its hypothesis of natural causes, medical men now feel that they are entitled to assume, on the basis of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... these beatitudes strike down to the eternal principle of natural, necessary causation and result, just as does the last verse which I have quoted from Galatians, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," not something else, that. Here is a clear and explicit annunciation of the eternal, universal law of cause ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... tonsilitis, adenoids, diphtheria and numerous other diseases? Because they are overfed. The younger the child the greater is the per cent. of disease due to wrong feeding. In adult life overeating and eating improperly otherwise are still the principal causes of disease. But during adult life the causation of disease is more complex than in childhood, for the senses have been more fully developed and instead of confining our physical sins to overeating we fall prey to the abuse of various ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... may be said to be simply that everything has a cause, and that human volitions are no more an exception to this universal law than any other class of phenomena. This belief in the universality of causation rests with him upon a primary intuition (v. 55), and not upon experience; and his whole argument pursues the metaphysical method instead of appealing, as a modern school would appeal, to the results of observation. The ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... visions may exercise an absolute sway. As to their occurrence, he or she is the final and absolute authority. There can be no question here. But when we proceed from the occurrence of these visions to the question of their causation, then we are on entirely different ground. Here it is not a question of their genuineness, or of their power, but a question of how we are to interpret them. The honesty and singlemindedness of these "inspired" characters may be admitted, but ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... shines in the dark, without a purpose of its own, self-radiant, so burns the lamp of the Tathagata, without the shadow of a personal feeling. Bore wood in wood, there must be fire; the wind blows of its own free self in space; dig deep and you will come to water; this is the rule of self-causation. All the Munis who perfect wisdom, must do so at Gaya; and in the Kasi country they must first turn the Wheel of Righteousness." The young Brahman Upaka, astonished, breathed the praise of such strange doctrine, and called to mind like ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... selected from authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end of lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends: life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and since a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at all: he is living still, and always will be living. And since Sir James Barrie couldn't write forever, he may ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton |
