Cause

Cause, the insatiable Why of human curiosity and interest, is naturally the storm centre of philosophy. What is meant by cause depends almost wholly upon the culture of the one who means it. The curiosity deepens as the culture advances. The average thinker or student is content with referring any novel fact to an acknowledged class. One who should hold every thing or event to the arbitrament that he could produce it himself would be regarded as a thorough radical; yet such a thoroughbred would halt just where the ripe philosopher begins, for his most anxious question is, “Does Personality explain”? “Know thyself” is philosophy’s most classic vocation; and possibly her keenest quest is as to whether one really knows himself when he thinks that he does. The definition of cause, or indeed of anything else, may depend upon the possibility of self-knowledge in a science of science.

All finite or parasitic reasoning is thrust out of rational propriety by the constant obsession of the reasoner’s own beginning, so that its most strenuous theoretical curiosity or demand for explanation arraigns the cosmos itself for a foundation or a fertility beneath it, not reflecting that the notion of beginning is a shadow cast by his own fate upon a ground that is not necessarily subject to such a demand, a ground that cannot be referred to previous ground in a quest for explanation. Cosmic beginning is unthinkable, owing to the lack of marginal space and time in which to distinguish its advent: there is no canvas for such a picture, which can obtain only as a nominal conjecture.

Shadworth H. Hodgson, then president of the Aristotelian Society, of London, in an address, Nov. 7, 1887, on the reorganization of philosophy, spoke as follows:

“A cause is conceived as an absolute existent making something else to be or to become. When the inevitable question, ‘How?’ is put to one of these absolute existents or causes, a progressus in indefinitum is entered on, to cause beyond cause, which continues until it is arbitrarily arrested by assuming a First Cause, which being uncaused by anything else, is conceived as ‘causi sui’ or self-existent . . . which combines the contrary characteristics of cause and effect in the same existent at the same time. . . . The term First Cause is therefore a contradiction which conceals ignorance, while at the same time it poses as an explanation. But such explanations are rapidly coming to be looked upon as not explanatory. The conception of cause seems to have been as unfruitful in science as it has been unthinkable in philosophy.”

If one could identify cause in an alien world, it would appear as the satisfaction of interest and curiosity as concerning the contents of experience; but after a cause has served for perfunctory explanation for a thousand kinds of curiosity and interest, it becomes practically objective, and the subjective element in the situation is sublated and obscured; the lesson of idealism is ignored; the fact is forgotten that in some way, or in some sense, the reason of things is reason. In the whole fact or occurrence, as seen in the alien world, the reason or the reasonableness of cause should be in the interpretation of the fact to the curiosity and interest of the subjective element of the experience: be the fact as it may, the cause as explanation is what contents the intelligence concerned. Objective or factual cause therefore were absurd: only in the contentment of intelligence can it pose as cause or reason or explanation. Even if we knew the ground of the fact sought to be explained, the subject inquiring may not be included in the explanation.

Born and bred as we are to struggle for existence in the world of wonders, compelled to be satisfied at best with merely partial successes, habited to ignore a myriad of miracles, and admonished by urgent necessities to suppress any ambition transcending the claims of our finite nature—cuffed by the great Mother, as Emerson said, and admonished to “eat your victuals, children, and say no more of it,” we realize betimes that even our curiosity is at fault, as to the limits and the meaning of our own discontent. “Pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw,” men even glory in momentary achievements which should but emphasize their impotence and ignorance. It is only the highest culture that attains any appreciation of the mystery of being.

As for causes, we have, according to our conscientious thoroughness, various grades of explanation; for instance, here is an explosion of gunpowder; the mere scientist is content to observe, and proud to declare, that it is due to the release of certain gases latent in a composition of sulphur, nitre and carbon; the savant goes deeper and brings up his “elements,” his electrons and what not; then comes the biologist with germs and cells and protoplasm; then the psychologist with his nerves, reactions, intuitions and instincts; then the metaphysician, questioning after reality and appearance; the idealist, determining all reality through subjective laws of the mind. And what next? If either of these experts shall plume himself with claims of radical explanation, he will but classify himself in an inferior culture; another expert shall warn him that his intelligence is but secondary and does not explain—that though he had himself made all things that are, as freely as he might write these words, his philosophy has yet to begin.

How philosophy grew, from the obsession of objective cause and natural necessity up to the conceit of self-relation; how it advanced from the savage superstition of controlling spirits in the air to elemental powers, as atoms and abstractions (such as heat and cold, love and hate) to the “nous” of Anaxagoras, and thence to the subjective skepticism of the sophists, in which every man was for himself the measure of all things, and the oracle of truth and justice; how Socrates as the chief of sophists made mind in general rather than man the individual the spokesman of reason, and made ideas the reality amid the illusions of sense; how the notion of principle, as prime fertility and power, mounted to the ego, first as the active demonstrator in a world of otherness, and then as surrepted (both the hammer and the anvil) into itself as self-related subject-object; how this psychological illusion of self-knowledge struggled for recognition for nearly a century (and has its defenders even now); how the disheartened professors shouted “Back to Kant!” how radical empiricism found matter-stuff as plausible as mind-stuff, so long as knowledge could not be essentially grounded in a science of science; how the post-Kantians (Schopenhauer, Hartman, Dühring, Lange, Bergson, et al.) exploited and glorified a de-personalized intelligence, and how Herr Eucken finally earned the Nobel prize by discounting the whole philosophical industry, and socially protesting, as to these latter-day protagonists, that “they do not exist!”—how all this came to pass makes a “very pretty quarrel as it stands.” The only literary comment that we presently find appropriate is, that while the full and ripe expounder of “The Problem of Human Life,” after graciously crediting all the original experts, merely deplores the “questions yet unanswered” and the “problems yet unsolved,” and still fails to see, or at best neglects to explain that the one crux of all—the one solution through which philosophy could succeed and justify its long career—is Self-Relation, failing of which there remains for humanity but the Mystery, and possibly the ultimate surd.

The path from the naïve cognition of common sense and “free will” up to the position from which Schwegler announced “a certain existent unreason” —or to that where Hodgson declares that “causality per se, has no philosophical or scientific justification,” and that “search for cause has been replaced by search for phenomenal antecedents merely, under the recognition that realities answering to the terms ‘cause’ and ‘causality’ are impossible and non-existent,”—is certainly a path of technical and scientific culture; yet the reader cannot know too soon, nor believe too cordially, that the mysterious glory and esoteric seclusion which have maintained the name philosophy as a headline of the literary program, and as well the pretensions that have emphasized the natural bewilderment of “the plain man,” are utterly inconsequent. The Mystery remains, as somewhat not so badly hinted by the Philosophical Dude: “Something, you know, that puts you in mind of something you can’t think of.”

Said Eucken: “After all the weary work of many thousand years, we are to-day in a condition of painful uncertainty, a state of hopeless fluctuation, not merely with regard to individual questions, but also as to the general purpose and meaning of life. . . . The facts themselves are questioned; doubt arises as to whether they can readily be affirmed as facts at all. . . . The supremacy of man is now more and more disputed, and especially the assertion that his place among the creatures is unique. . . . The content of man’s life is not the easy, unsought product of a natural process of historical development—not a necessarily proper process to or toward something really worth while.”

Again he has said: “Scarcely anything repels so much as the impertinence of representing the world as it is as a realm of reason.” “God (in Christianity) has taken the burden of it upon Himself, and thereby sanctified it . . .” but “Evil remains a permanently insoluble mystery.” . . . “An immediate consequence is the difficulty, indeed, the impossibility of an appropriate representation in thought and conception; every exposition remains a mere approximation, retains a symbolic character.”

Kant says: “Our reason has this peculiar fate, that with reference to one class of our knowledge it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored (because they spring from the very nature of reason) and which cannot be answered because they transcend the powers of human reason.”

As in idealism we were offered the alternative of regarding objects as either given to the mind from without or posited by consciousness from its own spontaneity, so, analogously, as to the question of cause, we may have acquired a habit of expecting to find only before our mental eye the ground of explanation, which can perhaps be found at least as plausibly behind it; in other words (as the philosophers say), cause may be only subjectively possible, and absurd when assumed as an object. And straightway we perceive, upon reflection, that any objective thing, taken as the cause of anything else, or of itself, would more obstreperously call for cause than does the thing to be explained; its presence would but double and complicate the problem; so that the reason of things must in some sense be reason itself as knowing itself. In other words (again), since intelligence proper can only contemplate and reflect, and cannot create or produce, cause proper (for us) shall mediate or interpret, not between the void and the fact which it could not produce, but between the fact as given and our intelligence as really such. It is not being then that demands or can furnish or represent cause, for cause objectively taken must have being on its own account. Fact is the deepest reality.

For assume that a thing has had a cause; must the cause remain to sustain and keep it caused? Surely not; the cause shall have passed on and left the thing, possibly with a momentum which now by its presence demonstrates the sufficiency of being for itself; and since the thing may have been eternally, as well as may any objective or knowable cause, being as such does not call for cause, and must be originally presumed in any consideration of the problem of existence. Philosophy, or explanation, must begin with the recognition of some existence, and can succeed only as the science of that science itself.

Fact, otherwise being (not cause), is the “first principle” of dialectic, the original presumption from which explanation must begin: a pre-assumption in time, which cannot have begun, since beginning were possible only in a time presumed. Cause then can be only a witness or interpretation of fact to present intelligence, and as a “reason” can have only a historical ground, sufficiently announcing that “it is”—because it is; its authority in explanation founds no deeper than the authenticity of the fact. It has always been too late for philosophy to factualize beginning or “first cause.”

It has been held naïve or puerile, saying of anything “it is because it is,” or “it goes because it is going.” But consider a revolving wheel, still whirling by reason of its “momentum”; the belt may be off, and all the men gone home: there is no material difference in the wheel whether moving or motionless, yet it goes by a potentiality of mere fact that now has no relation to any present cause or explanation. In this case the fact is final, but it became so: it once had causes; but since it persists without them, the only ground of its present being is its fact, whose miracle exhales in the presumption of time.

This is the first principle of dialectic philosophy, true if being and time are necessary presumptions. Whether anything at all is necessary is a later question, for a newcomer in time.

Whether self-relation, in the being or the thought of it, is possible to a finite and secondary intelligence—to a parasite as commensurate with the cosmos—is partly a question of analogy and perspective, which, to say the least, imposes upon us a certain modesty and humility.

It is of prime importance to philosophical sanity, presumed as capable of due appreciation and perspective, that it should have such a right estimate of the worth and dignity of man as may forecast the probability of his being competent to the secret of the world. Advised upon one hand that man was made in God’s image, and on another that nothing so becomes him as modest stillness and humility— admonished by the divinest of his race that of himself he can do nothing, yet prompted by the genius of his art and poetry,

the philosopher, who must hold by analogy, is admonished to regulate his pretensions and expectations by some contrast of his finite unity with any presumptive unity of the whole, or at least with the greatness of so much of it as he may apprehend in his brief career.

Measured under these lights, how pitiful indeed is the ephemeral parasite—

If philosophy will, like the green-eyed jealousy, still make a meat to feed upon, it should, in decency if not in reverence, consider its trivial measures as contrasted with merely the measurable—postponing for the moment the unlikelihood that the hymnic Mystery of the cosmos should be vocal to its puny and infantile ears. Even if he could learn the tune of it he cannot stay to enjoy it.

The authentic duration of time, with its inconsequent and seemingly purposeless destruction of organic and ambitious successes, and the violent disruptions of the strata which show that our planet was once symmetrical with water levels, discourage any conclusions or fanciful conjectures of progress toward a scientific resolution of the mystery or fate of being as a purpose of eternity. The whole conception of a development to some unthinkable result is alien to the ineluctable concession of eternity. We have authentic history which revered an antiquity long before it, which yet witnessed Assyria trampling down the nations and gathering their treasure “as one gathereth eggs that were forsaken,” and saw her in turn fall, exalting over the overthrow of Nineveh. It saw the second rise of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and lived in the midst of its splendors, and beheld them all pass away. “Then came down midnight.” So utterly had the local habitation and the name of these great cities vanished from the memory of man that 400 years before the birth of Christ, when Xenophon and the Ten Thousand marched through the land after the battle of Cunaxa, they passed the site of Nineveh and never knew of it, and camped before the ruins of Kalah, another of the cities of Assyria, and recalled them as of an “ancient city called Larissa.”

But we foreshorten and localize history, to make ourselves the special pets of Providence—children of God—the seed of Abraham or David, people of but six or seven thousand years ago, while as literal and secular fact we have in our institutions the unquestionable records of civilization in France a hundred thousand years ago. The excavations of Nineveh and Babylon have brought to light records which show Moses and Abraham as characters in the modern fringe of an antiquity that worked in bronze and silver and gold, and wrote laws and history and “literature” with diamond-pointed tools.

And before these run the sure records of geology, which like the stellar distances have to change the units of measurement, using millenniums as moments, to bring their expression within the compass of human calculation.

Said Kant: “From something that happens as an effect to infer a cause, is a principle of nature, though not of speculative knowledge. There does not remain the smallest justification of a synthetic proposition, showing how, from something which is, there can be a transition to something totally different which we call cause. . . . The principle of causality, which is valid within the field of experience (natural law), is utterly useless, nay, even meaningless, outside it.”

Hegel, in his logic of “essence,” drops the remark, “There is no such thing as a true causality.” . . . “In the case of cause and effect, the same matter is twice put” . . . “reciprocity is a higher relation than causality.”

It is impossible in logic that one thing should really produce another; at best it could be only on reciprocal or convertible terms: that is to say, logically each is cause or necessity of the other, as neither can be complete without the other. Cause proved as such, and emptied of its effect, would have ceased to objectively be.

It seems the best way to set this matter of causation right in popular apprehension to exploit the positions and relations of Kant and Hume in regard to it.

David Hume was a philosopher whose vocation was not so much to radical explanation as to the vacation of a popular and even a scientific preposession in regard to it—i. e., to the relation of reason to causality as a necessity in the nature of things. Kant was a philosopher only incidentally and by a necessary implication: he did not pose as an expert in fundamental explanation, nor in the enlargement of knowledge, but rather as a critic of the form and method of knowledge, regardless alike of the contents of the objects of knowledge and of the source of our power to know them. His metaphysics advisedly cut off philosophy and psychology at both ends of it. The power to think was by him attributed outright to “spontaneity” in the understanding—cutting off all debate so far as radical explanation was concerned—while on the other hand he ignored whatever matter might be found as a property of things in themselves. Between these two ignavias he proposed to criticise the form and method of thought, untroubled by either its origin or its results.

In his “Transcendental Analytic” he said: “I do not intend to burden my critical task, which concerns only the forms of synthetical knowledge a priori, with analytical processes which aim at the explanation of our concepts. I leave a fuller treatment of these to a future system of pure reason.”

“Pure logic takes no account of the contents of the knowledge of the understanding, nor of the difference of its objects. It treats of nothing but the pure forms of thought.

“Pure logic has nothing to do with empirical principles, and borrows nothing from psychology (as some have supposed). Psychology has no influence whatever on the canon of the understanding; everything in it must be completely a priori.”

“The Critique of Pure Reason,” in its scientific and only valuable content, was an inconsequent diversion, in academic rivalry with its predecessors, charging them with a haphazard procedure, instead of following the “sure method of a science.” This procedure he held at fault mainly in its assuming as realities mere conceptions, mere linguistic expressions (here following Bacon), which had no perceptive experience to corroborate them. In this unwarranted habit there had been pretentious demonstrations of God, and of freedom and immortality, which properly admitted of no such proof in any sure method of science that demands a foundation in an experience whose matter should staminate the logical form of thought.

This sure method of science Kant borrowed from Aristotle, who held Nature as the graduation of matter up to form, of being up to thought. These two items of matter and form Kant substituted with sense and understanding. Taking human cognition as his logical problem, he divided our mental equipment as of two stems from an unknown root, one stem, sense, having a receptive capacity to which objects are given, the other, understanding, being active, spontaneous, whereby objects are thought. These two faculties were in practice united, pervading each other, and considerable separately only for analytical results. Neither could be preferred to the other as an authority on truth or reality; they render a joint verdict, and every whole utterance of thought must have both their voices. Percepts of sense are blind without concepts of thought, and without the matter of sensibility concepts are wholly empty. The interpervasion of the two faculties is so thorough and essential that in their utmost distinction each shows a trace of the other: there is no sense so dull but it has a scintil of intelligence, and there is no conception so fine but it is haunted by the shadow of “a certain existent unreason.”

This unity of sense and understanding Kant seems to have mentally likened to a stream as of water that was ostensibly pure, yet carrying a sediment at its veriest surface, while the grossest matter at the bottom was not hopelessly opaque. Or he might have regarded the joint faculties as of a pencil, sharp at one end for punctual and explicit delineation, the other end being dull or blunt, for surfaces and gradations.

But we may see at once that he did not contemplate radical explanation in the union of these so different faculties, one wholly passive and receptive, the other spontaneous and autonomous; for while we may easily understand, how to the senses objects are “given” from without, we have still to wonder at the origin of thought, why that also is not “given.” In spite of his disqualification of all “empirical principles,” he jumbles cause, psychology and God in one monstrous fetich of “spontaneity.”

Lost amid the barren logomachies of the past, the weary spirit of philosophy has latterly paused in a certain resentful self-respect, as if she had gone too far afield, or looked too high, for a sufficient explanation. A man sometimes has moments when, if he were a divine psychologist, he might respect himself as original, as elemental, pure cause. When the boy is called down for the motive of his action, and shouts “‘Cause!” he claims the heart and truth of being. When a man, thwarted, baffled in his most desperate endeavor, growls through set teeth his fervent “God damn!” he is for once a reality; he gives assurance that out of the heart of Nature rolled the burden of the Bible old; that the canticles of love and woe came from the burning core below; that genius builds better than he knows.

I saw a plainsman involved with a corral of wild horses. Like a panther he encountered a huge stallion. Seizing his mane with the left hand he grasped the nose of the beast with the right, and was borne along, pounded from below by the knees of the creature as he reared and plunged, but the cowboy kept his hold, and with ever-shortening breath protested, “Die here! die here!”

The light, the vehemence that comes from beneath the threshold of articulate thought, or the venereal orgasm of the love that makes the world go round, is it not heat enough for cause? Should not something come of it? When we reach these depths of feeling do we not touch bottom? Are they not “sufficient reason”?

But now Citizen Kant had not the nerve to leave reason, our highest attribute and sublimest essence, at such an anomalous outcome as this; he had neither the courage nor the patience to appear the subtle agnostic genius that he really was. There was no sustaining audience for the most expert metaphysician in mental history. The Prussian bureaucracy and the Lutheran orthodoxy overshadowed his individual prestige. What then? What but a further demonstration of his skill, by showing that there is a counterpoising answer to all his charges against pure reason, a “moral” answer, complacent to the religion of his nation (which Hume made light of), to be won out of the heart and conscience of the people—a practical as against a theoretical judgment! What then but a rank stultification of the very reason that proposed it—a relief from the agonism of intelligence for a true vision of itself, by a cringing faith in a superstitious authority? Thus as a benevolent hypocrite (“corrupt,” as Schopenhauer characterized him, showing that in his revoke Kant had repressed some fifty-seven of the most liberal pages of his work), he exploited the sense of “duty,” the subservience forced upon human weakness by an overpowering environment, as a “categorical imperative”: “thou shalt,” and “thou canst because thou oughtst”—this although Luther himself had well said before, “There is no logical connection between can and ought.” But our apologist would hold no controversy as to how this sense of duty and the “ought” originated: it was there, and there was the end.

Though there truly were such a humiliating sense of subserviency it should be regarded only as an unfortunate handicap, indefensibly embarrassing explanatory thought. And while urging this moral sense of duty, obviously and undoubtedly in behalf of the prevailing view of Christianity, he seemed as having never heard the name of Jesus, who of all the race was the most distinguishably first to deny the self-sufficiency, the essential self-groundedness by which alone knowledge, as the science of science, would be philosophically possible. [If the name of Jesus appears in the 800 pages of the “Critique of Pure Reason” I have overlooked it.]

That Kant was weak, if not quite disingenuous in his quasi conformity, appears in an inconsistency too rank to pass for mere inadvertence in so clear a mind. There can be duty only as to acknowledged superiority; but Kant’s “reason,” despite his fling at it as in conflict with itself, was as spontaneous and autonomous in his account of knowledge, the dogmatic primate of first principles, the unconditioned referee of all metaphysical controversy, who should impose all duties and defer to none. The supreme may not subserve; so that his “categorical imperative” can be recognized only by an intelligence either incompetent or stultified; it should as well determine justice as cognition in its own case. Only his arrant slave should feel a sense of duty; the great man’s “ought” should be divinely his own, if reason is the true first principle.

It will appear in our notice of self-relation that Kant utterly disqualified the psychological illusion of “self-consciousness” from which popular theology infers its notion of “free will”—the same which Kant invoked for his “thou canst because thou oughtst.” But it is relevant here to recall from history and poetry instances of the divine “imperative” and the higher law, where great spirits have taken fate in their own hands, and assumed the judgment of justice itself, and law. For the law says well, “Thou shalt not kill”; but where was law, or justice, or any exoteric imperative, when Virginius drove home the flesher’s knife into the bosom of his daughter, and the flow of her young blood renewed pulsation in the stagnant heart of Rome? Or when sad Andronicus enacted the same tragedy with his daughter Lavinia? We recognize here the autonomous first principle, the dogmatic imperative of the theoretical reason, but the “ought” that shall subserve any alien category has sunk to insignificance. What shall impose a duty on the divine and highest? Shall he not do as he will with his own—even with his life?

We had an eminent literary recognition of divine independence in an obviously second thought of Tennyson, as correcting his poem “Lucretius”—not only in the hero’s taking his own life, but in his resentment of any imposition of duty upon his action. As first published the final paragraph of “Lucretius” read as follows:

I could not resist the impulse to congratulate the distinguished poet on this amendment, and his lordship graciously responded: “In ‘Lucretius,’ ‘What is duty?’ was the first reading; it was changed because I could not find that Lucretius had anywhere used the word ‘duty’ in that sense; but it stands now as at first.”

[An anecdote of Dr. Stirling.]

I have to recall an incident of the life of Dr. Stirling as having philosophical interest, in that it seems to demonstrate the psychological effect of the habit of transcendental thought upon practical affairs.

The learned doctor was very good to me in his day, corresponding freely and sending me his works, and indeed in his last book, “What Is Thought?” over-crediting me as “the authority” upon modern mysticism. He had achieved a considerable success through his literary ventures, especially his “Secret of Hegel” and his translation of Schwegler’s “History of Philosophy,” and it happened that he had on his hands some £4,000 which he desired to profitably invest.

Now here begins our moral. Of course the business world has developed a general conception of investment, which involves the agency of a professional broker—such is the conventional method, and so far well; so he placed his £4,000 in the hands of a broker. And conceptually a broker is a broker; as concepts there is no difference between brokers. But a canny Scot, even an LL.D. in metaphysics, should have been supposed to be alert to the perceptual and pragmatic difference underlying the transcendental concept, broker; unfortunately in this case the broker was a rascal, who abused the confidence unavoidable in his profession by misplacing the money, undoubtedly through a collusion intended for his own ultimate advantage.

Still untaught by this too frequent experience, our transcendental dabbler in “business” resorted to the next conventional method of righting a wrong: he employed a lawyer to make application to the courts. But the concept “lawyer” is not less general than the concept “broker.” Any honest expert would have told him that a breach of confidence is fatal, and that he had “lost” his money; but he persisted, still sending good money after bad, until, in spirit at least, he was nearly a broken man.

He sent a laborious account of the proceedings in the trial, still arguing against the errors of even the Court himself. I responded with encouragement, not indeed for the lost cause, but as contemplating for him a series of lectures in America, assuring him that our people loved a foreign celebrity quite as clearly as a Briton loves a lord. At first he seriously considered the undertaking, but I suspect that his keenness and his discomfiture alike were soothed to inactivity by reflections upon the good company in which I took pains to place him and his misfortunes. Had not Sir Walter Scott embarrassed himself and recovered? Had not Mark Twain retrieved a fortune lost in attempting pilotage through currents wholly strange to him? And as for being done out of his money, he had but to think of our General Grant: credited with the conquest of the great Rebellion, given a warship in which to junket around the globe, as the nation’s ambassador and the honored guest at every foreign court, he returned only to show his transcendental unfitness to the working world. He entrusted to a rascal the use of his signature, and became involved for ten times your £4,000, and then, with a virulent cancer gnawing at his throat, he put the last of his indomitable energy into a book that cancelled all his obligations, so fraudulently imposed, and scored his untarnished signature among the few, the immortal names that were not born to die.

I heard no more of the lecture course, but in the last of his letters, after a humorous protest at having to pay extra postage on my last advice, he woulded to God that he might again get so much consideration at any price.