entire failure to cope with the problem which substance left on Hegel’s hands. Cause and effect must be two as well as one; for if their difference were neglected the whole conception of production would vanish, and, as Hegel says, ‘we should have only the unrelated wet left.’[1] Substance divides itself into appearances which are themselves substantial: that is to say, substance has not only to appear in each factor but also as each, and in its conception it must include the operation of the accidents on and in each other.
The conception of causality, thus, involves two points of view. Cause and effect are two substantial terms, and they are one substance. Identity and difference are balanced against one another, but they do not properly cohere. Perhaps the general position is expressed most clearly when we say that the nature of the cause is to pass into an effect which is other than itself. In interpreting Hegel here we must not be misled by the emphasis he lays on the conception of causa sui: that is the point which is new to us, and we are apt to lose sight of the other aspect. The precise way in which causality unites unity and difference must be carefully noted, because a failure to take it sufficiently concretely will give us an abstract view of the higher category, the notion. Causality is the embodiment of necessity: in a causal series nothing can call itself its own; everything has been made what it is by forces which are other than it and which it regards as alien. That is to say, in causality itself the inherent unity is not yet in its own true form, it is not able to master and possess the element of difference. To put it another way, the aspects of the conception of causality, viz. identity and difference, pass immediately into one another, and the rationale of the movement is seen but imperfectly. This analysis may be difficult to apprehend at first sight, but it is involved in concrete shape in countless numbers of our ordinary judgements. We do mean something when we say that one thing becomes another, and we do not mean simply that one thing always follows another. Common sense does not know that Kant has shown that things are related in time only in virtue of a further relation of the things themselves, and that points of time are meaningless apart from a specific content within them. But it does feel that when the empiricists reduce
- ↑ V. Larger Logic, WW. IV. pp. 230-5; Encyclopaedia, § 154.
