ception may be due to its inveterate habit of taking time determinations as final.[1] When the effect is present, it says, the cause is past, and surely the past cannot be present. If we are to understand the conception of causality, however, we must rise above this naïve view; we must remember that we are looking for a connexion that is not broken by the passage of time, and that the externality of moments of time to one another cannot be the last word on the subject. If time enters at all its proper place is within the single content, not between two isolated facts with separate contents of their own. Further, one must rise above mere picture thinking. A material effect does not have a material reproduction of its cause inside it; we are dealing with conceptions, not with images. If a material thing is conceived as cause, it contains in its conception a reference to that which it produces; and if the two are separated in time it is only by thinking a unity which can transcend temporal distinctions that we can think of causality at all.[2]
Secondly, we must note the other aspect. Following Hegel’s view of causa sui, we have seen that he regards cause and effect as one content. But this unity is not achieved at the expense of difference: such a course would imply
- ↑ ‘There is at any rate a presumption against the truth of this doctrine. It is against the ordinary usage of language. In ordinary empirical propositions about finite things we never find ourselves asserting that A is the cause of A, but always that A is the cause of B. The Cause and Effect are always things which, irrespective of their being Cause and Effect, have different names. The presumption is that there must be some difference between things to which different names are generally given’ (McTaggart, Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, p. 176). For Hegel one of the disadvantages of the ordinary usage of language is that it is quite unable to apprehend at once the mutual implications of unity and difference, that in its clumsy analysis of itself it is content to have things either the same or different, and that it is bewildered when its attention is drawn to the concrete categories of the notion towards which the dialectic is here tending and which it cannot avoid embodying in the concrete. He would probably be surprised, however, to find a philosopher setting forth the inadequacies of ordinary speech against the concreteness—the incipient unity of opposites—of the higher categories of essence. Cf. Encyclopaedia, § 153 n.
- ↑ This does not mean that time is eliminated by causality, or that the unity in question is an abstract strand indifferent to change. Causa sui finds its full truth only in the notion, or ultimately the ‘idea’, which is a system containing all determinations within it as content.
