CONCEPTS OF &quot; REASON &quot; AND CA USE 87 



between &quot;cause&quot; and &quot;effect,&quot; in the popular sense of these 

 terms, is not far to seek : it arises from the practical attitude of 

 people in real life towards causality. When they want to pro 

 duce some one given kind of effect (death, for example), it may 

 matter little to them what particular, individual farm or character 

 this effect may assume, but it will evidently be of the greatest 

 importance for them to have a large number of distinct alter 

 native, individual &quot; causes,&quot; or modes of producing the generic 

 effect, to choose from. Hence, while people regard the &quot; effect &quot; 

 in the abstract, contenting themselves with one generic name 

 for it in all its varied individual manifestations, and care little 

 to distinguish between these latter in the concrete, they behave 

 in quite the opposite way towards the &quot; cause &quot; : noting and dis 

 tinguishing carefully, and often naming separately, its various 

 concrete, individual modes or forms, and calling each of these a 



&quot; The reason,&quot; writes Dr. Venn, &quot; why we look out for a cause is not to 

 gratify any feeling of curiosity, at least not primarily, but because we want to 

 produce some particular effect. . . . What the savage mostly wants to do is to 

 produce something or to avert something, not to account for a thing which has 

 already happened. What interests him is to know how to kill somebody, not 

 to know how somebody has been killed. Of course the past must interest him 

 to some extent, because what has happened once may come to pass again, but 

 this is a comparatively indirect or remote reference. What holds good of the 

 savage does so also, though to a somewhat less extent, of the great majority 

 of ordinary people : the explanation of the past will rationally be far sub 

 ordinate in interest to the prediction of the future. . . . When we want to 

 explain a fact an offer of several alternative solutions affords very little help. 

 . . . The scientific student of early culture vexes his mind to ascertain in 

 which of various possible ways fire was first produced, and employed by man ; 

 whether by lightning, by friction of boughs of trees, by sparks from flint chips, 

 or so forth. But for those whose only care was to make a fire when they 

 wanted it, such plurality of causes was all in their favour.&quot; 1 



And Dr. Mellone thus happily illustrates the same truth : &quot; Sometimes 

 what is practically most important is scientifically least important : it may be of 

 great importance to know what circumstances will produce an event without 

 knowing how they produce it. For instance, it may be of importance to clear 



from death by poison, and so on. The effect as a totality differs in each case from 

 that in every other case, and the very existence of the enquiries of coroners in 

 quests is a practical assertion of even popular belief in the reciprocity of the causal 

 relation, as it assumes that by a careful analysis of the total effect the cause is 

 arrived at, and this assumption can be only justified on the ground that this totality 

 could have had but one cause.&quot; WELTON, op. cit. t pp. 27-8. Cf. JOSEPH, op. cit., 

 pp. 446-47. 



1 VENN, Empirical Logic, pp. 56, 63, 64. 



