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Updated: May 11, 2025
A sounder Psychology has taught us that our conception of existence arises, in the first instance, from our own conscious experience; and that, when this conception subsequently expands into the idea of Absolute Being, and results in the belief of a necessary, self-existent, and eternal Cause, the new element which is thus added to it may be accounted for by the principle of causality, which constitutes one of the fundamental laws of human thought, and which, if it may be said to resemble intuition in the rapidity and clearness with which it enables us to discern the truth, differs essentially from that immediate intuition of which Spinoza speaks, since it is dependent on experience, and, instead of gazing direct on Absolute Being, makes use of intermediate signs and manifestations, by which it rises to the knowledge of "the unseen and eternal."
In this case, not only the series originated by this spontaneity, but the determination of this spontaneity itself to the production of the series, that is to say, the causality itself must have an absolute commencement, such that nothing can precede to determine this action according to unvarying laws.
Now that quantity which is apprehended only as unity, and in which plurality can be represented only by approximation to negation = O, I term intensive quantity. Consequently, reality in a phenomenon has intensive quantity, that is, a degree. This, however, I touch upon only in passing, for with causality I have at present nothing to do.
Knowledge of the origin of something certainly does not exclude the question wherefore it exists, and does not even take its place, and when I have answered both questions satisfactorily, then I may and must justly ask whether both that for which something exists and that by which something exists, is intended or not, whether that which in the language of causality I call cause and effect, also belongs to the category of finality, according to which that very cause is at the same time called means, and that very effect also design.
In order to find out what philosophers commonly understand by "cause," I consulted Baldwin's Dictionary, and was rewarded beyond my expectations, for I found the following three mutually incompatible definitions: "CAUSALITY. The necessary connection of events in the time-series....
Accordingly, permanence is a necessary condition under which alone phenomena, as things or objects, are determinable in a possible experience. But as regards the empirical criterion of this necessary permanence, and with it of the substantiality of phenomena, we shall find sufficient opportunity to speak in the sequel. Principle of the Succession of Time According to the Law of Causality.
It is now possible to state of what impression the idea of the causal nexus is the copy: the impression on which it is based is the habitual transition from the idea of a thing to its customary attendant. Hence the idea of causality has a purely subjective significance, not the objective one which we ascribe to it.
To represent all events in the world as actions of a God, to see God in all and all in God, to feel one's self one with the eternal, this is religion. As we look on all being within us and without as proceeding from the world-ground, as determined by an ultimate cause, we feel ourselves dependent on the divine causality. Like all that is finite, we also are the effect of the absolute Power.
Japan, on the other hand, has as yet no substitute for her prostrate ally. She is still alone among Powers some of whom decline to recognize her equality, while others are ready to thwart her policy and disable her for the coming race. The Japanese are firm believers in the law of causality. Where they desire to reap, there they first sow.
"Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege, Take up and read, take up and read." So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of his Virgilian lots, read: "Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness," with what follows. "Neither would I read any further, neither was there any cause why I should."
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