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In this case also the abstract conception of the good, the fitting, the useful, which constantly recur in popular speech are regarded, not as mythical powers personified in a human form, but as having a real existence in nature, as something extrinsic to the person or thing in which they are manifested, and as acting upon them as a living and causative power.
The causative relation between alcohol and desertion is so direct that it probably ought not to be included under contributory causes at all. As it is an active poison to the cells of the nervous system, it may bring about deteriorations of mind and character that are directly to blame for such anti-social acts as desertion.
According to the theory in question, Mind, or, to speak more precisely, Will, is the only cause of phenomena. The type of Causation, as well as the exclusive source from which we derive the idea, is our own voluntary agency. Here, and here only (it is said) we have direct evidence of causation. We know that we can move our bodies. Respecting the phenomena of inanimate nature, we have no other direct knowledge than that of antecedence and sequence. But in the case of our voluntary actions, it is affirmed that we are conscious of power, before we have experience of results. An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness of effort, “of force exerted, of power in action, which is necessarily causal, or causative.” This feeling of energy or force, inherent in an act of will, is knowledge
Indeed the attachments of libidinous feelings to persons of the same sex play no small rôle as factors in normal psychic life, and as causative factors of disease they play a greater rôle than those belonging to the opposite sex.
Science indeed has proved that if there is a Divine Mind in nature, and if by the hypothesis such a Mind exerts any causative influence on the phenomena of nature, such influence is exerted beyond the sphere of experience. And this achievement of science, be it never forgotten, is an achievement of prodigious importance, effectually destroying, as it does, all vestiges of a scientific teleology.
The public domain must be sacredly reserved to actual settlers, and where corporations have not complied strictly with the terms of their grants, the lands should be at once reclaimed. Without dwelling upon all the causative factors involving an extended work in themselves some significant general results will be pointed out.
It is urgently necessary to disperse the common fallacy according to which God, being the Author of all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is, there is responsibility.
There lay the secret of a certain ineffectiveness in his character. For he did not realise that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always. 'Behind Will stands Desire, and Desire is Action. And if he had accomplished this, how was it done? Not by preaching, certainly.
If, therefore, the essentials of Reality were ideal, it followed that they also were impotent, and incapable of causative efficacy. The sensible world, however, was a fluent and perpetually generated stream, which required some potent cause to uphold it.
Back of it as causative are matters we shall deal with in detail later on in relation to the housewife, matters like innate temperament, bad training, liability to worry, wounded pride, failure, desire for sympathy, monotony of life, boredom, unhappiness, pessimism of outlook, over-æsthetic tastes, unfulfilled and thwarted desires, secret jealousy, passions and longings, fear of death, sex problems and difficulties and doubt; matters like recent illness, childbirth, poverty, overwork, wrong sex habits, lack of fresh air, etc.
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