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Updated: May 5, 2025
The combination of ideas takes place without freedom, in a purely mechanical, way according to fixed rules, which in the last analysis reduce to three fundamental laws of association: Ideas are associated according to their resemblance and contrast; according to their contiguity in space and time; according to their causal connection.
"Beloved Master," I asked, "will you please describe more in detail the difference between rebirth on the earth and in the astral and causal spheres?" "Man as an individualized soul is essentially causal-bodied," my guru explained.
It is in a way not psychical therapy but psychical hygiene. And this is no longer confined to the physician but must be intrusted to all organs of the community. And here more than in the case of disease, the causal point of view of the physician ought to be brought into harmony with the purposive view of the social reformer, of the educator and of the moralist.
Without holding to any belief in the supernatural or the teleological, and while adhering to the idea that there has been, and can be, no break in the causal sequence in this world, may one still hold to some form of vitalism, and see in life something more than applied physics and chemistry? Is biology to be interpreted in the same physical and chemical terms as geology?
What sameness of character, again, of causal substance and effects, have you in mind when you maintain that from the absence of such sameness it follows that Brahman cannot be proved to be the material cause of the world? For we do not observe that in pots and jars which are fashioned out of a lump of clay there persists the quality of 'being a lump' which belongs to the causal substance.
As a matter of fact, however, we all assert that the water could not have come into a boiling condition unless the generation of heat had preceded; that in every case the fire must be there before the boiling of the water can commence. Whence do we derive this must? Simply and alone from the thought of a causal connection between the two events.
These preferences are in themselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of supererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of Hercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express and depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the causal process.
On one or another of these I fix my attention, thereby giving it a causal force over other present ideas, and rendering its future realization likely. So enormously important is imagination. By it we effect our emancipation from the present. Without this power to summon pictures of situations which at present are not, we should be exactly like the things or brutes already described.
There may, however, be incorrect generalization when this mistake is not committed; when the investigation takes its proper direction, that of causes, and the result erroneously obtained purports to be a really causal law. The most vulgar form of this fallacy is that which is commonly called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or, cum hoc, ergo propter hoc.
The uniformity of law in the occurrence of events according to the causal principle in the realm of material nature, can be approached by us in no other form than in that of mechanism, provided we understand by mechanism an activity according to law and which can be mathematically estimated as to size and number.
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