CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 367 



analysis, indeed, goes farther. It teaches that in what is here summed 

 up as rising of the sun and yonder as day, there lie again intricate 

 elements requiring special attention, in our own day extending per- 

 haps to the lines of thought contained in the electro-dynamic theory 

 of light and of electrons. Still the ways of thought remain the same 

 on all the levels of penetrating analysis. We have throughout to relate 

 to one another as cause and effect those events which, in a well- 

 ordered experience, must be regarded as following one another imme- 

 diately. The cause is then the immediate uniform antecedens, the 

 effect the immediate uniform consequens. Otherwise stated, the per- 

 ceived events that we are accustomed, from the standpoint of the 

 practical Weltanschauung, to regard as causes and effects, e. g., light- 

 ning and thunder, from the theoretical apprehension of the world 

 prove to be infinitely involved collections of events, whose elements 

 must be related to one another as causes and effects in as far as they 

 can be regarded as following one another immediately. No exception 

 is formed by expressions of our rough way of viewing and describing 

 which lead us without hesitation to regard as cause one out of the very 

 many causes of an event, and this, too, not necessarily the immediate 

 uniformly preceding event. All this lies rather in the nature of such 

 a hasty view. 



The present limitation of uniform sequence to cases of immediate 

 sequence sets aside, then, the objection from which we started, in that 

 it adopts as its own the essential point in question. 



Moreover, the way that leads us to this necessary limitation goes 

 farther: it leads to a strengthening of the empiristic position. It 

 brings us to a point where we see that the most advanced analysis 

 of intricate systems of events immediately given to us in perception 

 as real nowhere reveals more than the simple fact of uniform sequence. 

 Again where we come to regard the intervals between the events that 

 follow one another immediately as very short, there the uniformity of 

 the time relation makes, it would seem, the events for us merely 

 causes and effects; and as often as we have occasion to proceed to 

 the smaller time differences of a higher order, the same process repeats 

 itself; for we dissect the events that make up our point of departure 

 into ever more complex systems of component events, and the 

 coarser relations of uniform sequence into ever finer immediate ones. 

 Nowhere, seemingly, do we get beyond the field of events in uniform 

 sequence, which finally have their foundation in the facts of perception 

 from which they are drawn. Thus there follows from this conceptual 

 refinement of the point of departure only the truth that nothing 

 connects the events as causes and effects except the immediate 

 uniformity of sequence. 



None the less, we have to think the empiristic doctrine to the bot- 

 tom, if we desire to determine whether or not the hypothesis which 



