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98 THEORETICAL BIOLOGY 



activity, things display, in addition to the properties they 

 have in repose, others which we name " capacities." 



When we wish to embrace the sum-total of the properties 

 and capacities of a thing, we speak of an object. The posses- 

 sion of capacities characterises the object as contrasted with 

 the thing. The distinction is important, because, through its 

 capacities, an object reveals the whole of its reciprocal action 

 with other objects. 



Now a fixed subjective rule underlies this collective 

 reciprocal interaction of objects ; this rule is the so-called 

 law of cause and effect, or causality. 



Without this rule, which embraces all change in the world, 

 we should not be in a position to maintain the concept of the 

 object, but should merely experience unwinding series of 

 perpetually altered things. For, since we actually have the 

 world isolated before us only from moment to moment, we 

 see things cut off, as by a knife, from the moment that pre- 

 cedes and the moment that comes after. 



The object as such is not visible, because it has extension 

 in time. We may also call it a thing expanded by a moment- 

 sign ; and, by the use of this expression, its capacities are 

 revealed as new or altered properties. The fixed relations that 

 altered properties bear to the same unity are created by the 

 rule of causality, which makes the alteration appear as 

 the necessary effect of external causes. So the object con- 

 stitutes a higher unity than the thing, thanks to the law of 

 causality, which likewise is an outward manifestation of our 

 apperceptive process. 



Causality compels us to seek for a cause for every change 

 in the moment that has just gone, and for an effect in the 

 moment that foUows. It is causality which, throughout the 

 ages, throws a bond around aU world phenomena. 



Beginning with any selected moment, we can follow the 

 causal chain of change back into the past and forward into 



