ORIGIN OF THE NOTION OF CAUSALITY.
43. Are there in the world any cause and effect? This is equivalent to asking whether there is any change in the world. All change involves a transition from not-being to being. The least change is inconceivable without this transition. Whatever is changed is, after changing, inanotherway than it was before the change; therefore it has this mode of being which it had not before. This mode did not existbefore, it existsnow; it has passed, therefore, from not-being to being.
44. Even if we were not in relation with the external world, and our mind was confined to internal facts alone, to the consciousness of themeand its modifications, we should know that there is transition from not-being to being, by the testimony of the successive appearance of new perceptions and affections. Within ourselves we experience the ebb and flow of modifications which pass from not-being to being, and from being to not-being.
45. It is clear, from what has been said, that the ideas of cause and effect suppose a real or possible order of contingent beings. If there were only necessary and immutable beings, there could be no causes and effects.
46. I said (Chap. IV.) that the idea of cause contains the idea of being and the idea of relation to the not-being which has passed or passes to being. The idea of cause is not a simple idea; it is composed of these two. The idea of being alone is not sufficient to constitute it; for we may conceive being without conceiving cause. What the idea of cause adds to the idea of being is something distinct from the idea of being, and not contained in it; it may be called causality, power, productive force, activity, or any such term; they all express the relation of one being to realize in another the transition from not-being to being.
47. In the idea of causality is likewise included another simple idea, which, though accompanying the idea of being, must not be confounded with it. If any one should call it a modification of the idea of being, I should have no objection.
48. Whence does the idea of causality arise? The mere intuition of the idea of being does not seem sufficient to produce it. The idea of being is simple, it expresses nothing but being; we can, therefore, find in it no relation to the transition from not-being to being.
49. Does it, perchance, spring from experience? Here we must distinguish between the idea of causality, and the knowledge of the existence of the cause. Experience reveals the succession of beings, that is, their transition from not-being to being, andvice versa. We have already remarked that in the intuition of not-being with relation to being we see the impossibility of a transition, without the mediation of some being which executes it; therefore the certainty of the existence of the cause arises from experience, combined with the intuition of the ideas of being and not-being.
50. If this experience did not exist, we should not know that causality is possible; because in the idea of being, aswe possess it, we do not see the idea of force: we might perhaps conceive the force, but we could not know whether any thing in reality corresponds to it. We should thus have thenotionof the force, but not thenoticeof its existence, nor even the certainty of its possibility.
51. But if we examine it well, this want of experience is an impossible supposition; because a limited intelligent being, as uniting intelligence with limitation, feels the succession of its perceptions, and, consequently, experiences within itself the transition from a not-being to being. And as, on the other hand, it perceives its power of combining ideas, it perceives within itself the existence of causality, of a power which produces its reflections.
52. The exercise of our will, whether with respect to internal or external acts, likewise gives us the knowledge of the dependence of some things upon others; and the impressions which we receive without our will, or against it, confirm us in this conviction. Without this experience we should see the succession of the phenomena, but should not know their relations of causality; for it is clear that the inclination to assign as the cause of a phenomenon that which preceded it, supposes the idea of cause and the knowledge of the dependence of the phenomena in the relation of causes and effects.
53. Some philosophers say that man has no idea of the creation, from which, without intending it, they come to the conclusion that we have not the idea of any cause. By creation is meant the transition of a substance from not-being to being, by virtue of the productive action of another substance. I hold that this is only the idea of causality in its highest degree, that is, as applied to the production of a substance; but since therefore we have the idea of cause, the idea of creation is not a new and inconceivable idea, but a perfection of an idea which is common to all mankind.We have seen that the idea of cause contains the idea of producing a transition from not-being to being; this power is an attribute of every active being, but with this difference, that finite causes have only the power to produce modifications, whilst the infinite cause has also the power to produce substances.
54. Here we find the same thing as in other branches of our philosophical cognitions: the idea of the essence pertains to reason, the knowledge of its existence depends on experience. The first is independent of the second, and we may reason on the essence by means of the condition of existence, that is, by means of a postulate.[76]We always have this postulate, if in nothing else, at least in the phenomena of our consciousness.