3O Preliminary Considerations 



of causality and only holds good there; and here we 

 are dealing with two planes. 



Let us take a simple illustration. I hear a call for help 

 from the nursery; shout 'all right! I'm coming!' run 

 upstairs to see what is the matter, and find the child has 

 burnt himself. The call produces sound-waves, sets the 

 tympanum vibrating and stimulates sense-organs which 

 produce brain-changes in me. Contraction of various 

 muscles sets my voice to work to initiate trains of sound- 

 waves which will produce brain-changes in the child. 

 Contraction of other muscles produces motion, and 

 finally contact with the child. But the pain does not 

 cause the child's call any more than his call causes my 

 speech and my movements. There is a break in the 

 causal chain at each end. My free choice under the 

 stimulus of anxiety and emotions sets two causal chains 

 in action; the pain emotion of the child initiates another 

 causal chain of events. Emotion is itself the centre of 

 freedom, but there is a break at each end, where emo- 

 tion, freely acting, selects the desired causal chain. In 

 short, causality only holds good where the whole action 

 moves in one plane in this case within the categories 

 of time and space and no logic can envisage the whole 

 process, because its content is richer and fuller than the 

 reason. The importance of this will be seen later 1 . Now 

 apply this to the problem in hand. If A is becoming it 

 continues to be A, but yet grows fuller in content. Thus 

 A is A or not A according as one takes into account 

 from the first the larger concept of Order, or merely 

 the logical concept of identity according as one fixes 

 one's attention on the whole, or on the stage which 

 exists at one given moment 2 . 



Thus for God as Transcendent Being A is A ; the end 



1 See ch. iii. p. 98. 



1 Cf. Driesch, The Problem of Individuality, ch. iii.; especially 

 the passage on the disjunctive category, p. 56. 



