Part 11 (1/2)
This presupposes that some meaning has been found for the word ”cause”--a point to which I shall return later. What I want to make clear at present is that compulsion is a very complex notion, involving thwarted desire. So long as a person does what he wishes to do, there is no compulsion, however much his wishes may be calculable by the help of earlier events. And where desire does not come in, there can be no question of compulsion. Hence it is, in general, misleading to regard the cause as compelling the effect.
A vaguer form of the same maxim subst.i.tutes the word ”determine” for the word ”compel”; we are told that the cause _determines_ the effect in a sense in which the effect does not _determine_ the cause. It is not quite clear what is meant by ”determining”; the only precise sense, so far as I know, is that of a function or one-many relation.
If we admit plurality of causes, but not of effects, that is, if we suppose that, given the cause, the effect must be such and such, but, given the effect, the cause may have been one of many alternatives, then we may say that the cause determines the effect, but not the effect the cause. Plurality of causes, however, results only from conceiving the effect vaguely and narrowly and the cause precisely and widely. Many antecedents may ”cause” a man's death, because his death is vague and narrow. But if we adopt the opposite course, taking as the ”cause” the drinking of a dose of a.r.s.enic, and as the ”effect” the whole state of the world five minutes later, we shall have plurality of effects instead of plurality of causes. Thus the supposed lack of symmetry between ”cause” and ”effect” is illusory.
(4) ”A cause cannot operate when it has ceased to exist, because what has ceased to exist is nothing.” This is a common maxim, and a still more common unexpressed prejudice. It has, I fancy, a good deal to do with the attractiveness of Bergson's ”_duree_”: since the past has effects now, it must still exist in some sense. The mistake in this maxim consists in the supposition that causes ”operate” at all. A volition ”operates” when what it wills takes place; but nothing can operate except a volition. The belief that causes ”operate” results from a.s.similating them, consciously or unconsciously, to volitions. We have already seen that, if there are causes at all, they must be separated by a finite interval of time from their effects, and thus cause their effects after they have ceased to exist.
It may be objected to the above definition of a volition ”operating”
that it only operates when it ”causes” what it wills, not when it merely happens to be followed by what it wills. This certainly represents the usual view of what is meant by a volition ”operating,”
but as it involves the very view of causation which we are engaged in combating, it is not open to us as a definition. We may say that a volition ”operates” when there is some law in virtue of which a similar volition in rather similar circ.u.mstances will usually be followed by what it wills. But this is a vague conception, and introduces ideas which we have not yet considered. What is chiefly important to notice is that the usual notion of ”operating” is not open to us if we reject, as I contend that we should, the usual notion of causation.
(5) ”A cause cannot operate except where it is.” This maxim is very widespread; it was urged against Newton, and has remained a source of prejudice against ”action at a distance.” In philosophy it has led to a denial of transient action, and thence to monism or Leibnizian monadism. Like the a.n.a.logous maxim concerning temporal contiguity, it rests upon the a.s.sumption that causes ”operate,” i.e. that they are in some obscure way a.n.a.logous to volitions. And, as in the case of temporal contiguity, the inferences drawn from this maxim are wholly groundless.
I return now to the question, What law or laws can be found to take the place of the supposed law of causality?
First, without pa.s.sing beyond such uniformities of sequence as are contemplated by the traditional law, we may admit that, if any such sequence has been observed in a great many cases, and has never been found to fail, there is an inductive probability that it will be found to hold in future cases. If stones have hitherto been found to break windows, it is probable that they will continue to do so. This, of course, a.s.sumes the inductive principle, of which the truth may reasonably be questioned; but as this principle is not our present concern, I shall in this discussion treat it as indubitable. We may then say, in the case of any such frequently observed sequence, that the earlier event is the _cause_ and the later event the _effect_.
Several considerations, however, make such special sequences very different from the traditional relation of cause and effect. In the first place, the sequence, in any hitherto un.o.bserved instance, is no more than probable, whereas the relation of cause and effect was supposed to be necessary. I do not mean by this merely that we are not sure of having discovered a true case of cause and effect; I mean that, even when we have a case of cause and effect in our present sense, all that is meant is that on grounds of observation, it is probable that when one occurs the other will also occur. Thus in our present sense, A may be the cause of B even if there actually are cases where B does not follow A. Striking a match will be the cause of its igniting, in spite of the fact that some matches are damp and fail to ignite.
In the second place, it will not be a.s.sumed that _every_ event has some antecedent which is its cause in this sense; we shall only believe in causal sequences where we find them, without any presumption that they always are to be found.
In the third place, _any_ case of sufficiently frequent sequence will be causal in our present sense; for example, we shall not refuse to say that night is the cause of day. Our repugnance to saying this arises from the ease with which we can imagine the sequence to fail, but owing to the fact that cause and effect must be separated by a finite interval of time, _any_ such sequence _might_ fail through the interposition of other circ.u.mstances in the interval. Mill, discussing this instance of night and day, says:--
”It is necessary to our using the word cause, that we should believe not only that the antecedent always _has_ been followed by the consequent, but that as long as the present const.i.tution of things endures, it always _will_ be so.”[39]
In this sense, we shall have to give up the hope of finding causal laws such as Mill contemplated; any causal sequence which we have observed may at any moment be falsified without a falsification of any laws of the kind that the more advanced sciences aim at establis.h.i.+ng.
In the fourth place, such laws of probable sequence, though useful in daily life and in the infancy of a science, tend to be displaced by quite different laws as soon as a science is successful. The law of gravitation will ill.u.s.trate what occurs in any advanced science. In the motions of mutually gravitating bodies, there is nothing that can be called a cause, and nothing that can be called an effect; there is merely a formula. Certain differential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system, and which, given the configuration and velocities at one instant, or the configurations at two instants, render the configuration at any other earlier or later instant theoretically calculable. That is to say, the configuration at any instant is a function of that instant and the configurations at two given instants. This statement holds throughout physics, and not only in the special case of gravitation. But there is nothing that could be properly called ”cause” and nothing that could be properly called ”effect” in such a system.
No doubt the reason why the old ”law of causality” has so long continued to pervade the books of philosophers is simply that the idea of a function is unfamiliar to most of them, and therefore they seek an unduly simplified statement. There is no question of repet.i.tions of the ”same” cause producing the ”same” effect; it is not in any sameness of causes and effects that the constancy of scientific law consists, but in sameness of relations. And even ”sameness of relations” is too simple a phrase; ”sameness of differential equations” is the only correct phrase. It is impossible to state this accurately in non-mathematical language; the nearest approach would be as follows: ”There is a constant relation between the state of the universe at any instant and the rate of change in the rate at which any part of the universe is changing at that instant, and this relation is many-one, i.e. such that the rate of change in the rate of change is determinate when the state of the universe is given.” If the ”law of causality” is to be something actually discoverable in the practice of science, the above proposition has a better right to the name than any ”law of causality” to be found in the books of philosophers.
In regard to the above principle, several observations must be made--
(1) No one can pretend that the above principle is _a priori_ or self-evident or a ”necessity of thought.” Nor is it, in any sense, a premiss of science: it is an empirical generalisation from a number of laws which are themselves empirical generalisations.
(2) The law makes no difference between past and future: the future ”determines” the past in exactly the same sense in which the past ”determines” the future. The word ”determine,” here, has a purely logical significance: a certain number of variables ”determine”
another variable if that other variable is a function of them.
(3) The law will not be empirically verifiable unless the course of events within some sufficiently small volume will be approximately the same in any two states of the universe which only differ in regard to what is at a considerable distance from the small volume in question. For example, motions of planets in the solar system must be approximately the same however the fixed stars may be distributed, provided that all the fixed stars are very much farther from the sun than the planets are. If gravitation varied directly as the distance, so that the most remote stars made the most difference to the motions of the planets, the world might be just as regular and just as much subject to mathematical laws as it is at present, but we could never discover the fact.
(4) Although the old ”law of causality” is not a.s.sumed by science, something which we may call the ”uniformity of nature” is a.s.sumed, or rather is accepted on inductive grounds. The uniformity of nature does not a.s.sert the trivial principle ”same cause, same effect,” but the principle of the permanence of laws. That is to say, when a law exhibiting, e.g. an acceleration as a function of the configuration has been found to hold throughout the observable past, it is expected that it will continue to hold in the future, or that, if it does not itself hold, there is some other law, agreeing with the supposed law as regards the past, which will hold for the future. The ground of this principle is simply the inductive ground that it has been found to be true in very many instances; hence the principle cannot be considered certain, but only probable to a degree which cannot be accurately estimated.
The uniformity of nature, in the above sense, although it is a.s.sumed in the practice of science, must not, in its generality, be regarded as a kind of major premiss, without which all scientific reasoning would be in error. The a.s.sumption that _all_ laws of nature are permanent has, of course, less probability than the a.s.sumption that this or that particular law is permanent; and the a.s.sumption that a particular law is permanent for all time has less probability than the a.s.sumption that it will be valid up to such and such a date. Science, in any given case, will a.s.sume what the case requires, but no more. In constructing the _Nautical Almanac_ for 1915 it will a.s.sume that the law of gravitation will remain true up to the end of that year; but it will make no a.s.sumption as to 1916 until it comes to the next volume of the almanac. This procedure is, of course, dictated by the fact that the uniformity of nature is not known _a priori_, but is an empirical generalisation, like ”all men are mortal.” In all such cases, it is better to argue immediately from the given particular instances to the new instance, than to argue by way of a major premiss; the conclusion is only probable in either case, but acquires a higher probability by the former method than by the latter.
In all science we have to distinguish two sorts of laws: first, those that are empirically verifiable but probably only approximate; secondly, those that are not verifiable, but may be exact. The law of gravitation, for example, in its applications to the solar system, is only empirically verifiable when it is a.s.sumed that matter outside the solar system may be ignored for such purposes; we believe this to be only approximately true, but we cannot empirically verify the law of universal gravitation which we believe to be exact. This point is very important in connection with what we may call ”relatively isolated systems.” These may be defined as follows:--
A system relatively isolated during a given period is one which, within some a.s.signable margin of error, will behave in the same way throughout that period, however the rest of the universe may be const.i.tuted.
A system may be called ”practically isolated” during a given period if, although there _might_ be states of the rest of the universe which would produce more than the a.s.signed margin of error, there is reason to believe that such states do not in fact occur.
Strictly speaking, we ought to specify the respect in which the system is relatively isolated. For example, the earth is relatively isolated as regards falling bodies, but not as regards tides; it is _practically_ isolated as regards economic phenomena, although, if Jevons' sunspot theory of commercial crises had been true, it would not have been even practically isolated in this respect.
It will be observed that we cannot prove in advance that a system is isolated. This will be inferred from the observed fact that approximate uniformities can be stated for this system alone. If the complete laws for the whole universe were known, the isolation of a system could be deduced from them; a.s.suming, for example, the law of universal gravitation, the practical isolation of the solar system in this respect can be deduced by the help of the fact that there is very little matter in its neighbourhood. But it should be observed that isolated systems are only important as providing a possibility of _discovering_ scientific laws; they have no theoretical importance in the finished structure of a science.