CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 385 



start every new form of maintaining that forces underlie causa- 

 tion. 



However, misuse proves as little here against a proper use as it 

 does in other cases. Moreover, the scruples that we found arising 

 from the standpoint of empiricism against the assumption of forces 

 are not to the point. In assuming a dynamic intermediary between 

 cause and effect, we are not doubling the problems whose solution is 

 incumbent upon the sciences of facts, and still less is it true that our 

 assumption must lead to a logical circle. That is, a comparison 

 with the ideas of the old concept philosophy, which even in the 

 Aristotelian doctrine contain such a duplication, is not to the point. 

 Those ideas are hypostasized abstractions which are taken from the 

 uniformly coexisting characteristics of objects. Forces, on the other 

 hand, are the imperceivable relations of dependence which we must 

 presuppose between events that follow one another uniformly, if the 

 uniformity of this sequence is to become for us either thinkable or 

 conceivable. The problems of material scientific research are not 

 doubled by this presupposition of a real dynamic dependence, be- 

 cause it introduces an element not contained in the data of percep- 

 tion which give these problems their point of departure. This pre- 

 supposition does not renew the thought of an analytic rational 

 connection between cause and effect which the concept philosophy 

 involves; on the contrary, it remains true to the principle made 

 practical by Hume and Kant, that the real connection between 

 causes and their effects is determinable only through experience, 

 that is, empirically and synthetically through the actual indication 

 of the events of uniform sequence. How these forces are constituted 

 and work, we cannot know, since our knowledge is confined to the 

 material of perception from which as a basis presentation has de- 

 veloped into thought. The insight that we have won from the limit- 

 ing notion of force helps us rather to avoid the misuse which has 

 been made of the concept of force. A fatal circle first arises, when we 

 use the unknowable forces and not the knowable events for the 

 purpose of explanation, that is, when we cut off short the empirical 

 analysis which leads ad infinitum. To explain does not mean to 

 deduce the known from the unknown, but the particular from the 

 general. It was therefore no arbitrary judgment, but an impulse 

 conditioned by the very nature of our experience and of our thought, 

 that made man early regard the causal connection as a dynamic 

 one, even though his conception was of course indistinct and mixed 

 with confusing additions. 



The concept of force remains indispensable also for natural scien- 

 tific thought. It is involved with the causal law in every attempt to 

 form an hypothesis, and accordingly it is already present in every 

 description of facts which goes by means of memory or abstraction 



