original fact and as continuing to exist outside of that effect it produces. Apart from that effect which it has produced, the stone is undoubtedly a stone, only it is not a cause. It is a cause only in connection with its effect, or, to introduce the note of time, during its effect.
Cause and effect are thus, speaking generally, inseparable. Each has meaning and existence only in so far as it stands in this relation to the other, and yet they are supposed to be absolutely different. We cling with equal firmness to the idea that the cause is not the effect and the effect is not the cause, and the Understanding holds obstinately to this fact of the independent being of these two categories and of the absence of relation between them.
When, however, we have come to see that the cause is inseparable from the effect, and that it has any meaning only as being in the latter, then it follows that the cause itself is mediated by the effect; it is only in and through the effect that it is cause. This, however, means nothing more than that the cause is the cause of itself, and not of an Other. For this which is supposed to be an Other is of such a kind that the cause is first a cause in it, and therefore in it simply reaches itself, and in it affects only itself.
Jacobi has some reflections on this Spinozistic category, the Causa Sui (“Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza,” 2nd ed., p. 416), and I refer to his criticisms upon it just because they afford us an example of how Jacobi, the pioneer of the party of immediate knowledge or faith, who is so much given to rejecting the Understanding in his consideration of thought, does not get beyond the mere Understanding. I pass over what he says in the passage referred to regarding the distinction between the category of ground and consequence, and that of cause and effect, and the fact that in his later controversial essays he imagines he has found in this difference a true description and definition of the nature of God. I merely indicate
