causality to unconditional sequence (whatever unconditional may mean), they have omitted an identity—connexion if you will—that common sense asserts.[1] When A becomes B, A does not merely pass away and B arise; A becomes that which it is not: the cause becomes an effect, other than it, yet involving it in its conception as effect. This is a contradiction, but it is asserted by every judgement of causality; and it is difficult to see how it can be expressed otherwise than by saying that in causality the identity of cause and effect is immediately one with their difference. The cause and the effect have nothing in them that is not in the other also; their being is not their own. In the Larger Logic Hegel draws a careful line between the categories of substance and the categories of necessity, but the distinction is too minute to occupy us here.[2] Causality is the embodiment of necessity; and the nature of both principles lies in the dissipation of a thing into externality. A thing is compelled and does not act freely when a process, which works in it, and as it, cancels it and sets it up as something else. If one looks carefully, one sees that an external force acts on a thing only because the thing answers to it and that it is not merely external; but the relation is that of necessity when the very nature of the thing, in virtue of which it might claim to be self-determining, is not its own, but is constituted in it and as it from without. Hegel insists that any natural object which is subject to necessity is unable to sustain the contradiction within it. When the externality of its content or substance becomes apparent the thing is destroyed: only a higher principle than causality can attain unity and selfhood in and through externality.
At first, however, the conception which we have stated is not complete. The one factor is called cause or active, the other effect or passive; and only part of the full meaning of substance is given in each element. The unity already found
- ↑ Dr. McTaggart is not wrong in appealing to ordinary speech in this connexion: his error, I think, is in making the appeal to one aspect in order to exclude another. His argument in effect opposes one moment of the conception to the other and attempts to exclude the aspect of identity because of the presence of difference. Hegel admits both and their inconsistency as they appear here: the dialectic would stop at this point if the conception were genuinely self-consistent.
- ↑ For Dr. McTaggart’s view—a critical one—v. Commentary, chap. VII.
