PROFESSOR WHEWELL, ON CAUSE AND EFFECT. 323 



indirect physical causation is that consumed in the movements which take 

 place among the parts of the mechanism set in action, by which the 

 active forces so transformed into mechanism are transported over intervals 

 of space to new points of action, the motion of matter in such cases 

 being regarded as a mere carrier of force": — and when force is directly 

 counteracted by force, their mutual destruction must be conceived, as 

 the Reviewer says, to be instantaneous. We can therefore hardly 

 resist his conclusion, that men have been misled in assuming sequence as 

 a feature in the relation of cause and effect ; and we may readily assent 

 to his suggestion, that sequence, when observed, is to be held as a sure 

 indication of indirect action, accompanied with a movement of parts. 



But yet if we turn for a moment to other kinds of causation, we 

 seem to be compelled at every step to recognize the truth of the 

 usual maxim upon this subject, that effects are subsequent to causes. 

 Is not poison, taken at a certain moment, the cause of disorder and 

 death which follow at a subsequent period? Is not a man's early pru- 

 dence often the cause of his prosperity in later life, and his folly, though 

 for a moment it may produce gratification, finally the cause of his 

 ruin? And even in the case of mechanism, if, in a clock which goes 

 rightly, we alter the length of the pendulum, is not this alteration the 

 cause of an alteration which afterwards takes place in the rate of the 

 clock's going? Are not all these, and innumerable other cases, instances 

 in which the usual notion of the effect following the cause is verified? 

 and are they not irreconcileable with the new doctrine of cause and effect 

 being simultaneous? 



In order to disentangle this apparent confusion, let us first consider 

 the case last mentioned, of a clock, in which some alteration is made which 

 affects the i*ate of going. 



So long as the parts of the clock remain unaltered, its rate will remain 

 unaltered ; and any part which is considered as capable of alteration, may 

 be considered as, if we please, the cause of the unaltered rate, by being 

 itself unaltered. But we do not usually introduce the positive idea of 

 cause, to correspond with this negation of change. If we speak of the 

 rate as unaltered, we may also say that it is so because there is no cause 



