"Causation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Coleridge, "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... unhappier with science than without it. Who ever urged the contrary, that was worth listening to? I believe the human race will be more and more unhappy as science grows. But am I on that account likely to preach a crusade against it? Sister mine, we are what we are; we think and speak and do what causation determines. If you can still hold another belief, do so, and be thrice blessed. I would so gladly see you ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... is answered by saying that we know nothing in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law can only prevent miracles by compelling and making necessary the succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and consequents, but without a rational link or ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... demonstration (and most admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... observers; we will therefore ignore the distinction between voluntary and reflex movements. We will call the two together "vital" movements. We may then distinguish "vital" from mechanical movements by the fact that vital movements depend for their causation upon the special properties of the nervous system, while mechanical movements depend only upon the properties which animal bodies share with matter ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... be urged that the divine purposes are beyond our comprehension. God's purposes may, in spite of the inconceivability, admit the efficacy of prayer as a link in the chain of causation; or, as Dr. Mozely holds, it may be that 'a miracle is not an anomaly or irregularity, but part of the system of the universe.' We will not entangle ourselves in the abstruse metaphysical problem which such hypotheses ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... and necessary consequence of the teachings of certain journals. They have prepared the soil in which anarchy flourishes; they have sown the seed and they are answerable for the crop. This is no mere general statement; the chain of causation is clear. Not only does the campaign of violence date from the change in the tone of the Press, but specific outbursts of incitement have been followed by ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... community is to become a conflict of inter-woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on falling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking—persistent, destructive ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... not till I was a young man, at college, that I got any clew to the significance of my dreams, and to the cause of them. Up to that time they had been meaningless and without apparent causation. But at college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange mental states and experiences. For instance, there was the falling-through-space dream—the commonest dream experience, one practically known, by ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... truly calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the book, though not astonishing, like Sir William Hamilton's, is sufficient and always at the author's service. The text throughout, and especially the notes on Causation, Predestination, Original Sin, and Necessary Truths, will amply support our opinion. But better than either learning or logic is that noble and devout spirit pervading every page, and convincing the reader, that, whether the system advanced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... been added with a view to affording some information, first, as to the conditions under which a great part of the surgical work was done, and, secondly, as to the mechanism and causation of the injuries, which would not readily be at hand in the case of the general surgical reader. For much of the information contained in Chapter II. I must express my indebtedness to the work of MM. Nimier ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... history. No accident can disturb or thwart it; for, in truth, there can be no such thing as accident, except in our imaginations, and by reason of our incapacity to trace the continuous thread of inevitable sequence, or causation, which connects together all events whatever, in their inception, through their continuance, and to their end. All enlightened thinkers of the present age have recognized this great truth; and yet none have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how, he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will except by conceiving it as se finiens, predetermining itself to the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility of conceiving of Will except as se finiens is his very ground for rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... point of view of art, we notice first of all that in any question of an ending, whether happy or unhappy, art is doomed to satisfy itself and is denied the recourse of an appeal to nature. Life itself presents a continuous sequence of causation, stretching on; and nature abhors an ending as it abhors a vacuum. If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that nothing in life is terminal, nothing is conclusive. Marriage is not an end, as we presume in books; but ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... far as I know, nothing but well- authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which they force upon the mind. But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge of the remoter links in the chain of causation. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... one hand, we know that evolution has proceeded during an enormous time on this earth, under, so far as we can gather, a system of rigorous causation, with no economy of time or of instruments, and with no show of special ruth for those who may in pure ignorance have ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... of philosophical induction? As to your grand principle—NATURAL SELECTION—what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts! Development is a better word, because more close to the cause of the fact? For you do not deny causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God; and I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. He also acts by laws which we can study and comprehend. Acting by law, and under ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... found in the creature's conforming his will to that of his Maker; this is the trait of the angels who were steadfast in their faith. How can you here couple fatality and will? If ours be a state of probation, it is only by a certain freedom of action, an originating power of causation in ourselves, that we can conceive of our being put to proof. Possibly, in fallen man, that freedom is limited to the power of rejecting or yielding to the influences of grace. Yet within that narrow range it may be still a perfect ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... deceiving themselves so far as to believe that they could logically hold to it; but I declare that they have never succeeded in convincing any unprejudiced mind, and I defy any logician to prove that the conclusion of free will as consistent with eternal causation, is less absurd than that ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... more instances of this kind and matter, that according to this doctrine may much help the Theory of colours, and particularly the force both of Sulphureous and volatile, is likewise of Alcalizate and Acid Salts, and in what particulars, Colours likely depend not in the causation from any Salt at all, may beg his information from M. Boyle who hath some while since honoured me with the sight of his papers concerning this subject, containing many excellent experiments, made by him for the Elucidation of this doctrine, &c Dr. R. ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who demands—in place of a god who helps, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... term for that great Law known to Western thinkers as Spiritual Cause and Effect, or Causation. It relates to the complicated affinities for either good or evil that have been acquired by the soul throughout its many incarnations. These affinities manifest as characteristics enduring from one incarnation to another, being added to here, softened ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... essay on Objects of Terror, which precedes Montmorenci, a Fragment, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is "excited by the interference of a simple, material causation," and which "requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure." He condemns Walpole's Mysterious Mother on the ground that the catastrophe is only productive of horror and aversion, and regards the old ballad, Edward, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... but only a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius. The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead. There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood, though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black hole of Bethlehem ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... manner. He was always ready to help a fellow-worker in science or philanthropy if it were possible for him to do so. Thus, indeed, began the friendship between us. For when plague first invaded India in 1896, the writer was one of those sent to Bombay to work at the problem of its causation from the scientific side, thereby becoming interested in the life history of rats, which were shown to be intimately connected with the spread of this dire disease. Having for years admired Eha's books on natural history—The Tribes on my Frontier, An Indian Naturalist's ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... considered farther on, referred in a discourse of about forty years ago to three distinct stages in Unitarian theology. First, he pointed to the significance of the struggle for the principle of 'Unity in the Divine causation,' as against a doctrine which, as Unitarians maintain, endeavours in vain by words to prevent a triplicity of 'Persons' from sliding into a group of three Divine Beings. This struggle marks in great ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the incredulus odi is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... which revelation reposes. The former, it may be feared, are generally the ground of unbelief; the latter the basis of doubt. Christian writers, in the wish to refer unbelief to the source of efficient causation in the human will, with a view of enforcing on the doubter the moral lesson of responsibility, have generally restricted themselves to the former of these two classes; and by doing so have omitted to explore the interesting ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... from all his works, and yet acting in them. This doctrine has been held by the greatest thinkers the world has ever produced, such as Descartes, Lerbrisky, Berkeley, Herschel, Faraday, and a multitude of others." "It seems to be required," says Dr. McCosh, "by that deep law of causation which not only prompts us to seek for a law in everything but an adequate cause, to be found only in an intelligent mind." "Our greatest American thinker, Jonathan Edwards," says Dr. McCosh, (whom I can claim as my predecessor,) "maintains that, as an image in a mirror ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... words, rather than pour out his own ideas. Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him speak as he did now, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... contingency &c. (event) 151. predicament; emergence, emergency; exigency, crisis, pinch, pass, push; occurrence; turning point. bearings, how the land lies. surroundings, context, environment 229a[TE 232]; location 184. contingency, dependence (uncertainty) 475; causation 153, attribution 155. Adj. circumstantial; given, conditional, provisional; critical; modal; contingent, incidental; adventitious &c. (extrinsic) 6; limitative[obs3]. Adv. in the circumstances, under the circumstances &c. n., the circumstances, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... arrive at the important result known to chemists as the precipitation of insoluble compounds from solutions. In order to define this result, however, we must, of course, first consider the circumstances of causation of the result. Let us take a simple case of chemical decomposition resulting in the deposition or precipitation of a substance from solution in the insoluble state. We will take a salt you are probably acquainted with—sulphate ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... links in a chain of causes and effects, and to suppose that God breaks through this chain, is to make God contradict Himself. To this it may be answered that apart from any question of miracles, there are already flaws in this chain of causation, or rather, powers from without that can shake it, as, for instance, the outbreak of a war rendering a country, which should have been fertile, barren and wasted. Holy Scripture is not responsible for the phrase, "suspension of the laws of nature." Theologians do not ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... weakness overlooked and the stomach or the intestines treated, or treatment aimed at neuralgias, rheumatisms or rheumatic conditions, that a careful examination of the patient, and a consideration of the part the heart is playing in the causation of these symptoms ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... whence it was impelled by a certain force, and that it has followed a certain trajectory. In like manner, the student of physical geology, who fully believes in the uniformity of the general condition of the earth through geologic time, may feel compelled by what he knows of causation, and by the general analogy of nature, to suppose that our solar system was once a nebulous mass; that it gradually condensed, that it broke up into that wonderful group of harmoniously rolling balls we call ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... I suppose, owing to the survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... by the fact that, as a rule, mental healers have not regularly studied pathology, nor even anatomy. But it will be seen that if the principle of mental causation for disease is once admitted, mentality rather than physiology should furnish the field for operations. In order to heal, the mind of the patient must be brought into unison with that of the practitioner, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its manifestation on particular molecular arrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and, wherever he extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... causation in such instances may be well illustrated by the following case, that I select on account of its great resemblance to the ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... fact, the responsibility of which began and ended with the individual transgressor; he saw it as a part of a vast network and entanglement, and traced the lines of influence converging upon it in the underworld of causation. Hence the wrong and discord which pained him called out pity, rather than indignation. The first inquiry which they awakened was addressed to his own conscience. How far am I in thought, word, custom, responsible for this? Have none of my fellow-creatures an equitable right to any part which ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... begin by removing any possible misconception about the scope of these proceedings. They are not proceedings in which this Court can adjudicate on the causes of the disaster. The question of causation is obviously a difficult one, as shown by the fact that the Commissioner and the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in his report came to different conclusions on it. But it is not this Court's concern now. This is ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... isolated any mechanical causation, how can you be sure it's mechanical?" she was laying it on. "And if you're not sure it's mechanical, how can you suggest there's no possibility of psychological causation? The authorities that sent me here have not only considered the possibility, they feel it's ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... a species, requires and presupposes Divine power. A fortiori, then, the origination of a variety requires and presupposes Divine power. And so between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical conception of the other no contrariety remains. "A proper view of the nature of causation.... places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[9] A true and worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... space. We then behold the most attenuate form of matter of which we can conceive, as a condensation of creative energy, yet but a matrix fitted for the reception of a planet seed or soul. We recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being, from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass, herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple yet orderly expressions of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Berlin, have presented discussions of the commonest of sexual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor Freud, with his bold and original views on the sexual causation of many abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-analytic method of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no means universally accepted, is yet exerting a revolutionary influence all over the world. During the last ten years, indeed, the amount ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... this inexplicable content. Then came the thunder-storm. It was, perhaps, the thunder-storm that really deserves the blame for Missy's climactic athletic catastrophe. No lightning-bolt struck, yet that thunder-storm indubitably played its part in Missy's athletic destiny. It was the causation of renewed turmoil ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... sure if men will be able to understand the law of causality and the chain of existence, on which he himself meditated a whole night after his enlightenment, and his discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted processes, in which the connection between one generation and another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... beginning, or are now. This is not only true of the "germs" that are "in themselves upon the earth," but of every living thing, whether lying within or beyond the telescopic or microscopic limits. As a law of causation, as well as of consecutive thought, there must be in the order of life (all life) a continuous chain of ideas linking the past to the present, the present to the future, and the future to eternity. But that this continuous chain is dependent ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... of evolution differs from that of universal causation, to which even the ignorance of our own day has learnt to submit, in this mainly—it does not leave things on the level on which it finds them. Both cause and evolution assert the unity of being, which, indeed, every one must assume—even ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of art. And the Wise Men of the East owed their instruction to a star, which is rightly observed by Gregory the Great in favour of astrology. And Albertus Magnus makes it the most valuable science, because, says he, it teaches us to consider the causation of causes, in the causes ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... his duty is; and it is only because man's nature cannot be accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is open for an idealist ethics such as Green's. But perhaps Green laid too much stress on the problem of historical causation. What matters it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can know ourselves and the world? If we can now distinguish right and wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and follow a moral ideal, of what great importance are the steps by which the moral consciousness ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... tr., to help; dau fafi, to help, to surround; 2. prep, concerning, causation; fafia, because of. ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... that can benefit any one is the study of causation, and causation cannot be cognized by the physical senses. We never see, hear, feel, taste, or smell cause. What we see or hear is effect. Causation is mental. Natural science is dealing with phenomena, with effect not cause. A regular recurrence ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... miscellaneous poems which he had chiefly written at college, and he was among the original contributors to the Edinburgh Review, the opening article in the second number, on "Kant's Philosophy," proceeding from his pen. An essay on Hume's "Theory of Causation," which he produced during the struggle attendant on Mr Leslie's appointment to the mathematical chair, established his hitherto growing reputation; and the public in the capital afterwards learned, with more than satisfaction, that he had consented ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... philosophy, we are now reduced to the one universal assumption which has been variously described as the "principle of continuity," the "uniformity of nature," the "persistence of force," or the "law of causation," and which has been variously explained as a necessary datum for scientific thinking or as a net result of all induction. I am not unwilling, however, to adopt the language of a book which has furnished the occasion ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of Rebirth coupled with its companion law, the law of Causation does that. When we die after one life, we return to earth later, under circumstances determined by the manner in which we lived before. The gambler is drawn to pool parlors and race tracks to associate with others of like taste, the musician is attracted to the concert ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... we might repeat exactly, word for word, what we have just said of the imagination. This is unnecessary. Back of both, then, we have our true cause, whatever may be our opinion concerning the ultimate nature of causation and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... really any such thing as chance. Philosophy answers, in conformity with Aristotle's definition (Phys., II. iv.), that chance is merely relative to human purpose, and that what seems fortuitous really depends on a more subtle form of causation.—CH. II. Has man, then, any freedom, if the reign of law is thus absolute? Freedom of choice, replies Philosophy, is a necessary attribute of reason. Man has a measure of freedom, though a less perfect freedom than divine natures.—CH. III. But how can man's freedom be reconciled ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... my head—which was the immediate causation of your correspondence about the co-extension Imperialis Academia Caesariana Naturae Curiosum (don't I know their thundering long title well!)—I have to say that I was born on the 4th of May of the year 1825, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the land farmer corresponded by logical social causation to the social economy of this type. It was seated with family pews generally rented by the family group and sometimes owned in fee. In the South the slave-holding churches, which have all passed ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... analysis of the factors which produced the movement for the American Revolution illustrate the idea that historical causation is complex and multiple? What was the nature of the movement ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... creature by His will. Whence in the book De Synod., it is said: "If anyone say that the Son was made by the Will of God, as a creature is said to be made, let him be anathema." The reason of this is that will and nature differ in their manner of causation, in such a way that nature is determined to one, while the will is not determined to one; and this because the effect is assimilated to the form of the agent, whereby the latter acts. Now it is manifest that of one thing there is only one natural form ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... that new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present,—and which we call 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation,—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... stripped of ideas, ignominiously reduced to the obvious topic. To us, instead of being a mere prelude to more serious matters, or the last resort of a feeble intellect, it was the all-engrossing theme. The man with the latest hare-brained theory of the causation of the wind was accorded a full hearing. The lightning calculator who estimated the annual tonnage of drift-snow sweeping off Adelie Land was received as a futurist and thinker. Discussion was always free, and the subject was never thrashed out. Evidence ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns to causation as if to God. In its will was ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... processes of today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... we must regard the fall of arterial pressure, the depression of the fontanelle, and the turgescence of the vessels of the limbs as phenomena concomitant with bodily rest and warmth, and we have no more right to assign the causation of sleep to cerebral anaemia than to any other alteration in the functions of the body, such as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... between it and the cheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of wind means a momentary increase in velocity and density of which I cannot myself in the least explain,—and find in no book on dynamics explained,—the mechanical causation. ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... It seems like going a long way off from and around to the end in view. But there are no isolated facts and forces in the world and all things work together. When we see providence start in we never can tell where it is going to come out. If God is about to bless us, he may start the chain of causation that shall at length reach us in some far-off place or land; or if he is about to save a soul in China he may start with one of us in the contribution we make to foreign missions. Caesar Augustus, master of the world, from time to time ordered a census ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... the principle of continued uniformity of sequence our whole belief of causation, and consequently of the divine ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... matter into Mind, rejects all other theories of causation, restores the spir- itual and original meaning of the Scriptures, and ex- plains the teachings and life of our Lord. It is religion's [15] "new tongue," with "signs following," spoken of by St. Mark. It gives God's infinite meaning to mankind, healing the sick, casting ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... also when there is interposed betwixt them a third object, which bears to both of them any of these relations. This may be carried on to a great length; though at the same time we may observe, that each remove considerably weakens the relation. Cousins in the fourth degree are connected by causation, if I may be allowed to use that term; but not so closely as brothers, much less as child and parent. In general we may observe, that all the relations of blood depend upon cause and effect, and are esteemed near or remote, according to the number of connecting causes ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... and, so long as this conception remains, the law of each man's subjective consciousness makes it a reality for him. What is needed, therefore, is to establish the conception that external acts are NOT the only causative power, but that there is another law of causation, namely, that of pure Thought. This is the Law of Faith, the Law of Liberty; for it introduces us to a power which is able to inaugurate a new sequence of causation not related to ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alike reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical causation. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... aspects of our experience which we are accustomed to regard as real—qualities of things, the relations between things, the things themselves, space, time, motion, causation, activity, the self—turn out when carefully examined to be self-contradictory and absurd. They are not real; they are unrealities, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly remarkable ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart from possible "telepathic" causation, completely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... supernatural, that the Socialist has little need for such terms as atheist, freethinker or even materialist, for the word Socialist, rightly understood, implies one who (on all such questions) takes his stand on positive science, explaining all things by purely natural causation—Socialism being not merely a politico-economic creed, but an integral part of a consistent ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... practically identical with Maya, and may be regarded as a form of the Creative Energy of the Absolute, Brahman. This Maya (which while strictly speaking is illusion inasmuch as it has no real existence or eternal quality) is the source of time, space, and causation, and of the phenomenal universe, with its countless forms, shapes, and appearances. The Vedantists teach that the Evolution of the Soul is accomplished by its escaping the folds of Maya, or Materiality, one by one, by means of Rebirths, until it manifests ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... needs never speak aloud, needs never speak twice; to him her voice never grows less powerful, for he never neglects what she commands. And when he becomes aware that he can will his will, that God has given him a share in essential life, in the causation of his own being, then is he a man indeed. I say, even here this birth may begin; but with most it takes years not a few to complete it. For, the power of the mother having waned, the power of the neighbour is waxing. If the boy be of common clay, that is, of clay willing to accept ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... agencies, although that which is produced through them is still a creation and a work of the Creator), and declares his conviction that what is acting according to law in nature also stands under the causation and government of God like the first beginning of the universe—a postulate of our primary views without which the whole universe and our existence in it would harden into a cold mechanism without consolation ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... far nearer to accomplishment than he found it; and if in the end freedom and prosperity come to a united Ireland, they will be found to proceed—however deeply overlaid by years and by events may be the chain of causation—from the action which John Redmond took in August 1914, and upon which his brother, with a legion like him, set ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... classes them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.' {56} But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,—its cardinal idea,—that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... working with one other, a doubt arises regarding their relation as cause and effect. Such being the case, it is no fault of mine, nor do I deserve death on this account, nor am I guilty of any sin. Or, if thou thinkest that there is sin (in even such causation), the sin lies in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... appear about a particular day, and nothing is now more easy than to make out details of arrivals, there being a wide field for selection; and even how individuals had spoken to persons subsequently attacked—had stopped at their doors—had passed their houses, &c.[8] Causation is at once connected with antecedence, at least for a time, by the people at large, who see their government putting on cordons and quarantines, and the most vague public rumour becomes an assumed fact. We even find, as may be seen in the quotation given from Dr. ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... elements and forces, which supply us with the chemical contrivances and implements for further research surpassing the wildest dreams of astrologers and alchemists of old, there has been an unmistakable tendency to push the Divine agency farther and farther back in the chain of phenomenal causation, until it would appear that it had been finally thrust out of the world altogether. "I have swept the heavens with my telescope," said Lalande, "and I have not found your God." "The heavens are telling no more the glory of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... course of progress are always preceded by circumstances that form to them a natural approach and chain of causation. They are the results of which the causes stretch backward in the past. One of the things that has an incalculably determining influence on the present situation is that of the character of the present ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... that shoeing, in itself a necessary evil, may be responsible for injuries in the causation of which the smith can have played no part. Take, for example, the ill effects following upon the animal's attendant allowing him to carry his shoes for too long a time. In this case the natural growth of the horn carries ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... is an extract from a circular in relation to the causation and prevention of malaria and the life history and extermination of mosquitoes issued by the Department of Health, City ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... passes—the unanimity of the ignorant, the disagreement of the inquiring, and the unanimity of the wise—it is manifest that the second is the parent of the third. They are not sequences in time only, they are sequences in causation. However impatiently, therefore, we may witness the present conflict of educational systems, and however much we may regret its accompanying evils, we must recognise it as a transition stage needful to be passed through, and beneficent in its ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... imagination is a phenomenal universe, a genesis, a perpetual becoming, an entrance into existence, and an exit thence; the Theist is, therefore, perfectly justified in regarding it as disqualified for self-existence, and in passing behind it for the Supreme Entity that needs no cause. Phenomena demand causation, entities dispense with it. No one asks for a cause of the space which contains the universe, or of the Eternity on the bosom of which it floats. Everywhere the line is necessarily drawn upon the same principle; that entities may have self-existence, phenomena ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... been of interest, not only to the student of medicine, but to the lay-observer as well. In olden times there were many opinions concerning its causation, all of which, until the era of physiologic investigation, were of superstitious derivation. Believing menstruation to be the natural means of exit of the feminine bodily impurities, the ancients always thought a menstruating woman was to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... fact, merely a protest that man is conscious of a Will. And just as in other parts of his article Diderot by Liberty means only the existence of Will, so by Liberty he means only the healthy condition of the soul, and not its independence of causation. We need not waste words on so dire a confusion, nor on the theory that Will is sometimes dependent on cerebral antecedents and sometimes not. The curious thing is that the writer should not have perceived that he was himself in this preposterous theory propounding ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... to their presence, or to some strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the meeting of a magpie ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... causation in matter; but I think that is answered the same way as the other. But this last one; I do wonder if the Bible corroborates it?" Kate looked troubled again, as she read: "'There is no sin, sickness ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... of waste and morbid matter in blood and tissues creates the great majority of all diseases arising within the human organism. This will be explained fully in the following chapters which deal with the causation ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history, but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science, tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... peculiar characteristic, the mother hunts for some experience in the preceding months that might explain it. If she succeeds in finding any experience of her own at all resembling in its effects the effect which the infant shows, she considers she has proved causation, has established a good case of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... that the beliefs of memory precede the use of language, and therefore are originally purely instinctive, and independent of any rational justification, should have been of great importance to Hume, from its bearing upon his theory of causation; and it is curious that he has not adverted to it, but always takes the trustworthiness of memories for granted. It may be worth while briefly to make ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... who first dared to subject it to the uses of life. It is said that the tall monkies of Borneo and Sumatra lie down with pleasure round any accidental fire in their woods; and are arrived to that degree of reason, that knowledge of causation, that they thrust into the remaining fire the half-burnt ends of the branches to prevent its going out. One of the nobles of the cultivated people of Otaheita, when Captain Cook treated them with tea, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... all things, but the aggregate of the whole—an universal substance underlying the world of phenomena, or an universal process, carried on in and by the changes of things. Hence, as Aristotle said of the Eleatics, that, by asserting all things to be one, they annihilated causation, which is the production of one thing from another, so it may be said of the various schools of Pantheism, that, by maintaining all things to be God, they evade rather than solve the great problem ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... that as often as certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it remained for Darwin to accumulate proof that there is no break between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work of evolution, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin |
