CONCEPTS OF &quot; REASON &quot; AND &quot; CA USE &quot; 83 



This confusion of cause with effect arises from losing sight of the categoiy 

 of substance, and of the all-important Scholastic distinctions between agent and 

 action, and between extrinsic (efficient) and intrinsic (formal and material) 

 causes l (216, 218). These distinctions are real; they are in the reality ; they 

 are not merely mental or logical, different ways of regarding one and the same 

 reality. In all processes of physical change the formal and material causes 

 are intrinsic to, and identical with, the interacting agents, because they con 

 stitute these latter. In the change by which oxygen and hydrogen produce 

 water, the two former are materially identical with the latter, but then they 

 differ formally (in their &quot; formal &quot; or &quot; specifying &quot; causes) from the latter and 

 from each other. &quot; The combined elements and the water are one and the 

 same identical substance &quot; ; but if they are, they are really different from the 

 separate elements, for these on combining, on becoming water, on assuming 

 the &quot; form &quot; or &quot; specifying principle &quot; of water, lost the &quot; forms &quot; of oxygen 

 and hydrogen respectively. If the water were really identical with the oxygen 

 and hydrogen, the change would not have been real but merely mental : that 

 is to say, the processes of external nature would not be real but illusory : the 

 only real change taking place would be the change involved in the logical 

 process of the thinking mind. And this, in fact, is what the advocates of 

 Hegelian idealism profess to believe (215). 



Similarly, physical causes occupy space and act in space, but that con 

 tiguity in space, direct or indiiect contact, is essential to their activity, is not 

 clearly evident. That there is and must be a connexion of some sort, in 

 reality as well as in thought, between cause and effect, is undeniable. But 

 is actio in distans, i.e. across empty space or vacuum, metaphysically 01 

 physically impossible ? We know too little about the nature of matter, space, 

 and material action or motion, to give a categorical and decided answer to either 

 part of the question. &quot; How can a body act where it is not ? &quot; Professor Wei- 

 ton repeats the old puzzling query, 2 and hazards an answer. But would it not 

 be as well honestly to confess our ignorance of the &quot; how &quot; remembering 

 that this does not prove impossibility as to say that the body is there, where 

 its influence is felt, &quot;in one very true and important sense of its reality &quot; 

 in the sense of exerting influence there while it is not present there, but 

 absent from there, and present in another place, &quot; in another sense of its 

 reality the sense in which reality is identified with visible and tangible 

 form and tangible resistance &quot;? What then is space? if different &quot;senses&quot; 

 or &quot; aspects &quot; of a body s reality may be in different parts of it ? The author 

 does not inform us ; though, a few pages further on, 3 he seems to reduce all 

 physical efficient activity to local motion, and this latter to change of &quot; spatial 

 relations &quot;. This reduction of even qualitative and substantial changes in 

 physical nature to mechanical or local change has only its simplicity to 



1 Cf. JOSEPH, Logic, p. 451. 2 o/&amp;gt;. cit., pp. 20, 21. 



3 ibid., p. 24 : &quot; When it is said in this connexion [in mechanics, regarding the 

 conservation of energy] that the cause equals the effect, the cause spoken 

 of is not a thing but the efficient action of a thing, and this action reduces itself to its 

 permanent attributes in a certain spatial relation to the object on which it acts &quot;. 

 The efficient action of a physical cause is thus analysed into certain permanent at 

 tributes of that cause, plus certain spatial relations between it and the &quot;object&quot; 

 upon which it is conceived to &quot; act &quot;. 



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