Exfoliation 



age is not to build on the past, but to rise out of 

 the past and throw it off ; only of course in such 

 matters where all forms of thought are inadequate 

 it is hard to say that one way of looking at the 

 subject is truer than another. As before, we 

 should endeavour to look at the thing from different 

 sides. 



We are obliged to use images to think by — e.g. 

 the opening of a flower or the accretive growth 

 of a coral reef — and possibly it would save a good 

 deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words 

 the truth that all our theories in science and philo- 

 sophy are simply metaphors of this kind — but 

 the fact still lies behind and below them. 



Perhaps, if we are to use the word Cause at 

 all, we should do well to use it in the old sense in 

 which the final cause and the efficient cause are 

 one (the eidos of Aristotle) — to use it not so much 

 to link phenomena or externals to each other as 

 to link each phenomenon in a group to the thought 

 or feeling which underlies that group. The notes 

 in the Dead March in Saul, for instance. We 

 cannot say that one note is the cause of another, 

 but we might say that each note stands in a causal 

 subordination to the feeling which inspired the 

 piece — which is the origin of the piece and the 

 result of its performance — the alpha and omega 

 of it. Similarly, the ground floor in a house 

 is not the cause of the first floor, nor the first floor 

 of the second floor, nor that of the roof ; but these 

 actualities and the whole house itself stand in 

 strict relationship to a mental something which is 



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