CONCEPTS OF &quot; REASON &quot; AND CA USE &quot; 63 



philosophers of the positivist school claim that when physical 

 science has discovered the invariable antecedents of a pheno 

 menon nothing further remains for investigation. Moreover, the 

 logician of induction should not confine his investigations to the 

 data of the physical sciences alone ; he must investigate our 

 thinking processes about all conceivable data. The distinction, 

 therefore, between condition and cause, need not be altogether 

 ignored. 



We must next consider that the same thing or reality, the 

 same phenomenon or agency, may evidently be the effect of cer 

 tain efficient causes, and itself the efficient cause of other effects : 

 looked at in one connexion, from one point of view, it is an effect ; 

 in another connexion and from another point of view it is an 

 efficient cause. Thus we see, in physical nature, innumerable 

 series or chains of efficient causes, wherein each link has others 

 depending on it while itself in turn depends on others : whether 

 each follows the other in time or all exist simultaneously. Every 

 event in nature is the result of a long series of causal antecedents 

 stretching indefinitely backward and outward in time and space, 

 or rather of the convergence and co-operation of many such series. 

 It is precisely owing to this fact that inductive research for the 

 &quot; efficient causes &quot; of the phenomena of nature constitutes such a 

 difficult problem. When can we be said to have discovered in 

 ductively the group of agencies which are to be regarded as the 

 &quot; total &quot; efficient cause of any phenomenon ? What portion of all 

 the converging series of influences are we supposed to bring to 

 light explicitly, and to designate as the total efficient cause of an 

 event ? How far backward and outward from the event, and how 

 far forward and inward towards the event, are we to proceed in 

 our analysis of its concomitant and antecedent circumstances ? 



Let us take, as an instance of natural causation, the formation 

 of water from oxygen and hydrogen. If we draw through the 

 process a line of demarcation (220) at the moment the water 

 begins to appear, and regard the appearance of the latter as the 

 effect to be explained, we shall evidently need to examine the 

 antecedents down to this very line itself, lest any indispensable 

 factor escape our notice. And in the backward direction, in enu 

 merating remoter antecedents which were indispensable steps lead 

 ing up to the final result, where are we to stop? Are we to in 

 clude not only the necessary heat, but the source of the latter 

 the electric machine? and its maker? Are we to include not 



