Chapter 8
Causes and effects; explanation of why things happen; first causes; causality in nature and action.
701 passages · 236 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
To ask for the cause of a thing is to ask why it is, why it came to be, or why it happens as it does. The idea gathers the oldest question of natural philosophy, which Socrates recalls as the attempt to learn why each thing exists, comes into being, and perishes1. It gathers a question of logic as well, about what entitles us to pass from what we see to what we do not, and a question of theology, about whether the chain of causes ends in a first cause. Moral philosophy raises it too: is a man’s choice a cause of a different kind from the push of one body on another? Few ideas run so evenly through these books. Bacon makes knowledge of causes the end of his imagined college2. Hobbes defines science as knowing how things come about so that like effects can be produced3. Faraday urges his young hearers to ask of every new result what its cause is4. At the same time Hume makes causation the hinge of all reasoning about fact and then denies that we ever perceive it5,6.
The first difficulty is to say what a cause is at all. In the Phaedo, Socrates, waiting in prison, separates the true cause of his staying from its conditions. His bones and sinews are things without which he could not sit there, but the reason he sits there is his choice of what seemed best7. Burke draws the same line in a homelier way: a man must be alive to be murdered, but his being alive is not the cause of the murder8. He warns too against taking a concomitant for a cause, like the fly that thought it raised the dust behind the chariot9. Lowell applies the distinction to politics, calling Lincoln’s election the occasion and not the cause of secession10. Darwin applies it to biology, likening changed conditions of life to a spark that sets combustible matter alight without fixing the form the flame will take11. Plutarch’s anecdote of Pericles and Protagoras spending a day on whether the javelin, the thrower, or the organizers of the games caused an accidental death shows how open the question was even in antiquity12.
The word itself is ambiguous, as Long observes in commenting on Marcus Aurelius. The emperor resolves things into the material, the causal, and their purpose or relation, and the term “cause” has shifted its sense among Indian, Greek and modern thinkers13,14. Dante’s account of the moon’s spots appeals to what the schools called a formal cause, the varying virtue of the heavens rather than density or rarity15. In The Alchemist, Jonson can mock the whole apparatus of efficient, material, formal and final causes as pedantry fit for grounding a quarrel16. Plato’s own positive doctrine is subtler. Socrates cannot see how adding one to one makes two, and he takes refuge in the “safe” answer that things become beautiful or great or two by participating in beauty, greatness, or duality17,18,19. He then refines it into a cleverer answer in which fire is cause of heat and soul of life20. Several authors also warn against reversing cause and effect. Smith holds that wages and profit cause price while rent is its effect21, and that the export of gold is the effect, not the cause, of a nation’s decline22. Burke argues that the idea of a great power must precede the dread of it, so fear did not make the gods23.
Hume turns the inquiry from the world to the mind. All reasoning about matters of fact rests on cause and effect, yet no effect can be discovered in its cause by reason alone. The motion of the second billiard ball is an event wholly distinct from the first, and a priori anything might produce anything24,25,26. A man newly come into the world would see succession but could not reach the idea of cause27. What makes us expect the effect is constant conjunction working on the mind through custom, a habit we share with animals and children28,29,30,31. Hume then looks for the idea of power or necessary connexion. He finds none in bodies, and none in the will moving the limbs or summoning an idea, for the will’s production of an idea is as incomprehensible as creation32,33,6. Necessity, then, is the mind’s felt transition from one object to its usual attendant34. Accordingly, cause can be defined only by conjunction or by that customary transition35. Even so, Hume insists that nothing exists without a cause and that chance is a merely negative word36. The analysis echoes through the later books. Shelley grants that we know of cause only constant conjunction37, Emerson repeats that no copula joins cause and effect but only consecution38, and Long concludes that cause in the vulgar sense means regular sequence of phenomena39.
Against this analytic dissolution stands an older picture of causes woven into a single fabric. Marcus Aurelius sees all things as cooperating causes, rationally connected rather than merely succeeding one another, and calls necessity the sum of all existing causes40,41,42. He watches seed become child through hidden successive causes whose power is unseen yet plain43. Pascal holds that everything is cause and effect, bound by an imperceptible chain, so that the parts cannot be known without the whole44. Emerson makes cause and effect two sides of one fact, the effect already blooming in the cause45,46, and calls skepticism simply unbelief in cause and effect47. The same web of causes poses the puzzle of proportion. Pascal muses that Cleopatra’s nose might have changed the face of the world, and Virgil derives a war from a wounded stag48,49. Lowell, against such views, demands adequate causes for great effects, as the oak requires the acorn50. Darwin gives the idea scientific body in his chains of dependence, running from cats to mice to bees to clover, and from cattle to firs51,52. He adds the case of goats that, by destroying a forest, exterminated land-shells two centuries later53.
If causes form a chain, does it have a first link? Hobbes thinks curiosity itself, pursuing cause behind cause, must end in a first and eternal cause, as even heathen philosophers confessed54,55. Raleigh argues that matter cannot cause itself, since it would have to exist before it existed56. Rousseau’s Vicar reasons that inert matter cannot move itself, and that an infinite regress is no first cause at all. Motion must therefore come from a will, and intelligent effects from an intelligent cause57,58,59. Within this tradition, nature becomes God’s instrument. Browne says crediting nature is like crediting the hammer with the house60, and that effects are named by their nearest causes while God remains the cause of all61. Bacon holds that the mind resting in scattered second causes may stop short, but the linked chain leads to Providence62. Dante has the heavens serve as Providence’s instruments in shaping men’s natures63.
Berkeley goes further. Philonous argues that an inactive, unthinking thing cannot cause ideas, so spirit is the only agent and God the immediate author of natural effects64,65. Hume answers that this occasionalism merely extends our ignorance of how bodies act to the case of mind, and then makes the Deity the sole cause of everything66. He doubts too that an intelligent cause can be inferred from cosmic order, since a cause known only by its effect must be proportioned exactly to it and supports no further inference67,68,69. Mill recalls his father’s lesson that asking who made God shows the first-cause answer only pushes the difficulty back70.
Explanation by end has had a similar history of confidence and retreat. Marcus Aurelius holds that everything exists for some end and that nature regards the end as much as the beginning71. Harvey reasons freely about the purposes of the valves and the right ventricle72,73, and Burke explains by final cause why the passions of preservation differ from those of generation74. Plutarch offers a reconciliation. When Anaxagoras dissected the one-horned ram and found its natural cause, and Lampon read its meaning, both were right, the one giving the cause and the other the end75. Harvey nonetheless rejects a proposed purpose for the foetal passages and defers the final cause of the heart’s motion76,77. Darwin holds that similarity of pattern cannot be explained by utility or final causes and that such phrases as “plan of creation” merely restate the facts78,79. Yet even he gives a final cause for the absence of metamorphosis in some young80, so the language of purpose is limited in his pages rather than abolished.
Human action raises the question whether choice is a cause like other causes. Plutarch asks how divine causality can coexist with human origination of action81. Kant answers by distinguishing two kinds of causality. Will is an efficient cause belonging to the intelligible world, freedom being causality that gives itself its law, while as phenomenon man is determined from without82,83,84. Rousseau’s Vicar similarly treats free acts as first impulses without prior cause85. Hume denies the contrast. The mind passes from motive to action as readily as from figure to motion, apparent contingency is the effect of hidden contrary causes, and without such necessity actions would be detached from character86,87,88. Mill describes how the doctrine of necessity, misunderstood, brought on his depression89.
History invites the same causal ambition. Plutarch weighs rival motives behind Pericles’s decree, and he denies that Antony caused the civil war as Helen did the Trojan, since Caesar’s ambition was the cause90,91. Emerson asks whether race or air, soil and laws made England92. Taine boldly declares that vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar, and that race, environment and epoch are the complete set of historical causes, compounded like mechanical forces93,94,95. The Buddhist writings offer a different and far older doctrine of causal series. Dependent origination runs from ignorance through karma to birth, old age and death96. Its factors arise jointly, not singly, and it excludes both uncaused and self-determined existence97. Deeds ripen like seed in soil, rebirth arises from causes in the old existence as the mango from its predecessor, and so responsibility persists without a separate reaper98,99,100.
The moderns turn the search for causes into method. Descartes seeks first causes and then deduces effects, while noting that experience certifies the effects which in turn establish the causes101,102. Voltaire’s Newton defends naming an effect, gravity, while its ultimate cause stays unknown, since impulsion is no better understood103,104. Burke likewise seeks efficient causes of the sublime and declines the ultimate one105. The tests sharpen as well. Darwin appeals to common descent as a vera causa against repeated creations106. Mill notes that the composition of causes holds in mechanics but not in chemistry107. Pasteur demands successive cultures and reproduction of the disease to prove an organism the sole cause rather than an epiphenomenon108,109. And where causes elude us, honesty requires a confession. Darwin says “chance” in variation merely acknowledges ignorance of causes110, and Kelvin mocks blaming electricity for every unexplained phenomenon111.
The sciences in these volumes are therefore full of particular causal arguments. Herodotus traces the Nile’s rise to the sun112. Lyell insists that past changes of the earth were wrought by causes now operating over immense time113,114, and Darwin explains barrier reefs by subsidence115. Kelvin defines tides by their cause, attraction116, and Helmholtz traces the work of engines back to chemistry and the sun117,118. In medicine, Harvey makes ventricular contraction the single cause of the pulse119, Jenner traces cowpox to diseased horses’ heels120, Holmes follows puerperal fever to the attending physician121, and Lister ascribes suppuration to atmospheric organisms122. In economic life, Manzoni names the true cause of scarcity, disproportion of food to demand, which remedies only suspended123. Against all this stands mistaken causation. Hobbes traces superstition to inferring from mere succession and substituting gods for second causes124,125. Manzoni’s Milanese prefer poisoners to contagion126, and Darwin’s townsfolk blame witchcraft for the boiling sea127.
What remains open is visible in the books themselves. Whether necessity lies in things or in the mind, as Hume holds, is still disputed. So is whether will is a cause outside nature, as Kant holds, and whether a first cause ends the regress or merely names it. Darwin’s frequent confessions of ignorance128,129 suggest that the search for causes advances by working out what the causes are not, while the ultimate causes, as Hume says, stay beyond our enquiry130.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Reasoning 6a · Experience 3a
See also: Experience 2c · Reasoning 6a · Custom and Convention 1b
See also: Will 1c · Experience 3a
See also: Reasoning 6c · Nature 4d · Hypothesis 6a · God 1c
See also: Evolution 4b
See also: Matter 3a
See also: Will 1c · Matter 5b · God 5c
See also: Will 1b · Liberty 1b
See also: Necessity and Contingency 3a
See also: Race and Nationality 3a · National Character 2a · Science 6b · History 7d
See also: Same and Other 3c · Soul 7d · Punishment 10f · Desire 4c
See also: Experience 9a
See also: Induction 5b · Geology 1a · Science 3d · Change 5b
See also: Geology 7c · Mechanics 5a · Astronomy and Cosmology 4b · Physics 6c
See also: Physics 2d · Experience 9e · Science 3a
See also: Evolution 5d · Animal 6a · Hypothesis 5a
See also: Medicine 8c · Experience 9c · Life and Death 1d · Hypothesis 5d
See also: Evolution, Geology, Experience, Hypothesis, Science, Animal