CAUSE
459
CAUSE
most "Notitiae episcopatuum ", as late as the twelfth
or thirteenth century, place it in Lycia.as a suffragan
of Myra. Four bishops are mentioned by Lequien
I. USD: Basil, who attended the council at Seleucia
in 359; Antipater, at Chalcedon in 451; Nieolaus,
who subscribed the letter to Emperor Leo in 458;
Stephanus at Nicsea in 7S7. The interesting
ruins of the city are half an hour from the
modern village of Dalian, in the vilayet of Konia,
on the right bank of a little brook, the ancient Kalbis.
Among them are a theatre, a large rectangular build-
ing thai was probably a temple, others of uncertain
destination, a Byzantine church, and very curious
rock-hewn tombs.
CoLXJGNON, in Bulletin de eorrespondance JielUnique (1877), I, 338—46; Smith. Diet, of Greek and Roman Geography (London, 1878). 576.
S. Pktrides.
Cause (Gr. airta. atnov, Lat. causa, Fr. cause, Ger. Ursache; from the Latin both the Italian term cosa and the French chose, meaning " thing ". are derived), as the correlative of effect, is understood as being that which in any way gives existence to, or contributes towards the existence of, any thing; which produces a result : to which the origin of any thing is to be ascribed. The term cause is also employed in several other suppositions, philosophical, scientific, legal, etc., to which reference will be made in the course of the present article. The description just given is thai of cause taken in the philosophical sense, as well as in its ordinary signification in popular language, for. strictly speaking, cause, being a transcendental, cannot receive a logical definition. It is that also commonly advanced as a preliminary to the investi- gation of the nature of causality, in the schools. Although the ideas of cause and of causality are quite obviously among the most familiar that we pos- sess, since they are involved in every exercise of human reasoning, and are presupposed in every form of argument and by every practical action, a very great vagueness attaches to the popular concept of them, and a correspondingly great ambiguity is to be found in the use of the terms expressing them. In view of this fact, it will be necessary to clear the ground traversed in the main portion of the present article by stating that it is concerned, not so much in treating of individual causes considered in the con- crete, as with the analysis of the idea of causality underlying and involved in that of every cause. There is also a psychological, as well as a metaphysi- cal. asiK-ct of the subject, which ought not to be lost sight of, especially in that part of the article in which the more recent speculations with regard to causality are touched upon.
V a matter of fact, all mankind by nature attrib- utes to certain phenomena a causative action upon others. This natural attribution of the relationship of cause and effect to phenomena is anterior to all philosophical statement and analysis. Objects of sense arc grouped roughly into two classes — those aci and those that are acted upon. No neces- sarily conscious reflection seems to enter into the judgment that partitions natural things into causes and effects. But when we proceed to ask ourselves precisely what we mean when we say, for example, that A is cause and B effect, that A causes B, or that B is the result of A. we raise the question of causality. Whatever answer we put forward, it will be the state- ment of our conception of causation. It will be the expression of our judgment as to the actual relation- ship between A and B involved in the conception of the one a.s cause and of the other as effect. It will probably be found, when we attempt to formulate any answer to tin- question, that much more is in- volved than we had at first sight thought; anil, since the investigation we should pursue would probably proceed upon lines analogous to those upon which
philosophy has, as a matter of fact, travelled, it will
not be amiss to trace the history and development of
the problem concerned with causes and causality, and
to set down briefly the various solutions advanced.
We shall begin, therefore, with the first crude concep-
tion of power or efficiency, and pass on through the
stages of hyloism and idealism to the full analysis of
cause and statement of causality made by Aristotle.
This will be considered merely in outline, and filled
in in the following more detailed account of the doc-
trines of the Schoolmen upon the subject, who, while
adopting it in all its main lines, in several respects
modified the teaching of the Stagirite. The critical
attack upon the possibility of a knowledge of causal-
ity, made by the Scottish sceptic Hume, will next be
considered in its relation to the reply of the Common
Sense School, as represented by Reid. The doctrine
of Kant, with its double sequence of idealism and ma-
terialism, will be touched upon briefly; and, with a
comparison of the mechanical concept of modern
science with regard to causes and the more funda-
mental metaphysical analysis of causality, the philo-
sophical treatment of the topic will be brought to an
end.
Before the inception of the pre-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy, the first rude and popular con- ception of causes was mixed up with much that was extravagant and, in the proper sense of the word, superstitious. The powers of nature were personi- fied, and thought of as intelligent and wilful. They were conceived of as far more powerful than man, but uncertain and capricious, so that it, was necessary to propitiate them and enlist their favour by offering them sacrifices and praying to them. Thus there was the idea of power, and a loose attribution of effects to one or another of the natural forces that had vaguely come to be looked upon as causes. It was in order to provide a ground of unity, rather than thus to dis- tract causes, that the early philosophers took up their search for the principles of things. The problem im- mediately before them was that of explaining similar- ity and diversity, as well as change, in the visible world. With them, though the term atria was em- ployed, and even occasionally in several of the senses in which Aristotle later distinguished it, the com- moner term was apx'n, with which the former was ap- parently generally interchangeable. By this term a principle was designated that, in some vague sense, approaches in meaning to the material cause of the Stagirite. It was used to signify an entity prior to existing entities, and yet in some way coexisting with them and furnishing the ground or reason for their existence. But it did not connote the idea of cause in the strict sense, namely as that which actu- ally gives being to its effect, such as is involved in later concepts of causality and is derived from the observation and analysis of the conditions of physical change. The problem thence arising had not yet been definitely set. The task of the philosophers of these early schools was the investigation of nature, with, for result, the discovery of its elemental con- stituent or constituents, its primordial principles. Thus the representatives of both the Ionian and Eleatic Schools, in reducing all things to a single purely material basis, or to several bases, assign, in- deed, a principle that may be considered as a concrete cause, but do not raise the real question of causality, or give any satisfactory account either as to how one thing differs from another or as to how things can come to be at all. Nor, in explaining diversity and change by assigning heat, rarefaction, condensation, arrangement in space, number, etc., was more than an attempt made to call closer attention to the fact of causation and to determine more accurately than did popular opinion what were the concrete causes by which things came to be what they are. This, obvi- ously, is not an analysis of causality, and in no sense
