Chapter V: Of The Law Of Universal Causation (3)

If either Anaximenes, or Thales, or any of their contemporaries,
had held the doctrine that νοῦς was the Efficient Cause, that
doctrine could not have been reputed, as it was throughout
antiquity, to have originated with Anaxagoras. The testimony of
Aristotle, in the first book of his Metaphysics, is perfectly
decisive with respect to these early speculations. After
enumerating four kinds of causes, or rather four different
meanings of the word Cause, viz., the Essence of a thing, the
Matter of it, the Origin of Motion (Efficient Cause), and the End
or Final Cause, he proceeds to say, that most of the early
philosophers recognized only the second kind of Cause, the Matter
of a thing, τὰς ἐν ὕλης εἶδει μόνας ᾠήθησαν ἀρχὰς εἷναι πάντων. As
his first example he specifies Thales, whom he describes as taking
the lead in this view of the subject, ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς
φιλοσοφίας, and goes on to Hippon, Anaximenes, Diogenes (of
Apollonia), Hippasus of Metapontum, Heraclitus, and Empedocles.
Anaxagoras, however (he proceeds to say), taught a different
doctrine, as we _know_, and it is _alleged_ that Hermotimus of
Clazomenæ taught it before him. Anaxagoras represented, that even
if these various theories of the universal material were true,
there would be need of some other cause to account for the
transformations of the materials, since the material can not
originate its own changes: οὐ γὰρ δὴ τό γε ὑποκείμενον αὐτὸ ποιεὶ
μεταβάλλειν ἑαῦτο; λέγω δ᾽ οἰον οὐτε τὸ ξύλον οὔτε ὁ χαλκὸς αἴτιος
τοῦ μεταβάλλειν ἑκάτερον αὐτῶν, οὐδὲ ποιεῖ τὸ μὲν ξύλον κλίνην ὁ
δέ χαλκὸς ἀνδριάντα, ἀλλ᾽ ἑτερόν τι τῆς μεταβολῆς αἴτιον, viz.,
the other kind of cause, ὄθεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως—an Efficient
Cause. Aristotle expresses great approbation of this doctrine
(which he says made its author appear the only sober man among
persons raving, οἰον νήφων ἐφάνη παρ᾽ εἰκῆ λέγοντας τοῦς
πρότερον); but while describing the influence which it exercised
over subsequent speculation, he remarks that the philosophers
against whom this, as he thinks, insuperable difficulty was urged,
had not felt it to be any difficulty: οὐδέν ἐδυσχεράναν ἐν
ἑαυτοῖς. It is surely unnecessary to say more in proof of the
matter of fact which Dr. Tulloch and his reviewer disbelieve.

Having pointed out what he thinks the error of these early
speculators in not recognizing the need of an efficient cause,
Aristotle goes on to mention two other efficient causes to which
they might have had recourse, instead of intelligence: τύχη,
chance, and τὸ αὐτομάτον, spontaneity. He indeed puts these aside
as not sufficiently worthy causes for the order in the universe,
οὐδ᾽ αὑ τωῷ αὐτομάτῳ καὶ τῇ τύχῃ τοσοῦτον ἐπιτρέψαι πρᾶγμα καλῶς
εἰχεν; but he does not reject them as incapable of producing _any_
effect, but only as incapable of producing _that_ effect. He
himself recognizes τύχη and τὸ αὐτομάτον as co-ordinate agents
with Mind in producing the phenomena of the universe; the
department allotted to them being composed of all the classes of
phenomena which are not supposed to follow any uniform law. By
thus including Chance among efficient causes, Aristotle fell into
an error which philosophy has now outgrown, but which is by no
means so alien to the spirit even of modern speculation as it may
at first sight appear. Up to quite a recent period philosophers
went on ascribing, and many of them have not yet ceased to
ascribe, a real existence to the results of abstraction. Chance
could make out as good a title to that dignity as many other of
the mind’s abstract creations: it had had a name given to it, and
why should it not be a reality? As for τὸ αὐτομάτον, it is
recognized even yet as one of the modes of origination of
phenomena by all those thinkers who maintain what is called the
Freedom of the Will. The same self-determining power which that
doctrine attributes to volitions, was supposed by the ancients to
be possessed also by some other natural phenomena: a circumstance
which throws considerable light on more than one of the supposed
invincible necessities of belief. I have introduced it here,
because this belief of Aristotle, or rather of the Greek
philosophers generally, is as fatal as the doctrines of Thales and
the Ionic school to the theory that the human mind is compelled by
its constitution to conceive volition as the origin of all force,
and the efficient cause of all phenomena.(130)

With regard to the modern philosophers (Leibnitz and the
Cartesians) whom I had cited as having maintained that the action
of mind upon matter, so far from being the only conceivable origin
of material phenomena, is itself inconceivable; the attempt to
rebut this argument by asserting that the mode, not the fact, of
the action of mind on matter was represented as inconceivable, is
an abuse of the privilege of writing confidently about authors
without reading them; for any knowledge whatever of Leibnitz would
have taught those who thus speak of him, that the inconceivability
of the mode, and the impossibility of the thing, were in his mind
convertible expressions. What was his famous Principle of the
Sufficient Reason, the very corner-stone of his Philosophy, from
which the Pre-established Harmony, the doctrine of Monads, and all
the opinions most characteristic of Leibnitz, were corollaries? It
was, that nothing exists, the existence of which is not capable of
being proved and explained _a priori_; the proof and explanation
in the case of contingent facts being derived from the nature of
their causes; which could not be the causes unless there was
something in their nature showing them to be capable of producing
those particular effects. And this “something” which accounts for
the production of physical effects, he was able to find in many
physical causes, but could not find it in any finite minds, which
therefore he unhesitatingly asserted to be incapable of producing
any physical effects whatever. “On ne saurait concevoir,” he says,
“une action réciproque de la matière et de l’intelligence l’une
sur l’autre,” and there is therefore (he contends) no choice but
between the Occasional Causes of the Cartesians and his own
Pre-established Harmony, according to which there is no more
connection between our volitions and our muscular actions than
there is between two clocks which are wound up to strike at the
same instant. But he felt no similar difficulty as to physical
causes; and throughout his speculations, as in the passage I have
already cited respecting gravitation, he distinctly refuses to
consider as part of the order of nature any fact which is not
explicable from the nature of its physical cause.

With regard to the Cartesians (not Descartes; I did not make that
mistake, though the reviewer of Dr. Tulloch’s Essay attributes it
to me) I take a passage almost at random from Malebranche, who is
the best known of the Cartesians, and, though not the inventor of
the system of Occasional Causes, is its principal expositor. In