Along with this account of the origin of knowledge of cause goes a definition of cause which is at the present day quite widely ac cepted. The cause of any event is a preceding event without which the event in question would not have occurred. Both causes and effects are always events; not things, but things in action. The complete cause would be all the indispens able previous events. But as all inquiry that is of any value is confined within limits. the ques tion as to the cause of an event is not generally a demand for a complete inventory of indispens able previous events, but for some event which, in connect ion with other events taken for granted, is needed to account for the event under discussion. According to this view of cause neither the 'material cause' nor the 'formal cause' is a cause; and the 'final cause' is a cause only in the sense that the idea of the end to be obtained, together with all the affections belong ing to it, may, as an event, lie an indispensable temporal prerequisite to an action that ter minates in the attainment of the end. A final cause is then not a future event as an event that in time will take place, but as one now anticipated. And the anticipation precedes the effect it produces.
This brings up again the question as to the temporal relation of cause and effect. Some philosophers of to-day. following Sextus Em piricus, maintain that cause cannot be anterior to effect. This. however. is a mistake resting upon a failure to appreciate the eontinuous character of time The cause exists be fore the effect, hut continues itself into the ef fect. It is to sonic extent an arbitrary matter a here the line lie drawn that divides cause from effect ; hut drawn it must he somewhere if one is to lie clear-headed in talking ali(iut and when drawn all the part of the continuous cause-effect process that precedes the line is cause, and all the part that follows is effect. And the line itself does not exist as a gap be tween cause and effect, but simply as the line of juncture of cause and effect. See CONTINUITY,
Law or.
This last statement brings us to the last point here to be made as to the nature of causality. After all that has been said the relation between cause and effect is still left unknown, prorid«I one assumes that the indispensableness of cause to effect is the result of au unknown something in the nature of the cause and of the effect. 1:ut suelt an assumption is ungrounded, if by nature one means a mysterious constitution of qualities. A simple view which seems to satisfy all the conditions of the case, and to leave no insoluble mystery. is that the causal relations in which an event stands are part of the attributes of the event. We do not have two self-subsistent in dependent events, which are then in some incom prehensible way made to depend one on the other, as effect upon cause. 'Neither event is properly thought unless its discoverable causal relation to the other is thought of as being part of its nature as much as any other quality it may have. Thus we think of cause and effect not as magically conditioning each other, but as being different steps in a continuous process, within which each step is what it is by virtue of its relation to all other steps. Cause and effect are organically inter-related, and the organic vv hole within which they interact is the ground of their interaction. Consult: Bosanquet, Logic, Vol. I. (Oxford, 18881; Bradley, Principles of Logic (London. 1883) ; llobliouse. Theory of Knowledge (London, 18913), consulting index for pertinent passages: Mill, System of Logic, Book III. (London, 1850 ; Hume. Treatise of Human Yature, Book I., Part III. (London, 1882) ; and id., An Enquiry Concerning the Human Under standing (Oxford. 1894) Kant, "Transcendental Logic." in Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Max Miller (London, 1SSI ) ; and Kant's com mentators. among whom may be mentioned Ca i rd, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Glasgow, 1889). and Watson. Kant and His English Critics (Glasgow, 1881).