374 METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE 



ing this form of expression, M. Comte leaves himself without any 

 term for marking a distinction which, however incorrectly expressed, 

 is not only real, but is one of the fundamental distinctions in science." 1 

 For my own part, the right seems to be on the side of Comte 

 and his recent followers in showing the old nomenclature to be worn 

 out, if viewed from the standpoint of empiricism. If the relation 

 between cause and effect consists alone in the uniformity of sequence 

 which is hypothetically warranted by experience, then it can be 

 only misleading to employ words for the members of this purely 

 formal relation that necessarily have a strong tang of real dynamic 

 dependence. In fact, they give the connection in question a peculiarity 

 that, according to consistent empiricism, it does not possess. The 

 question at issue in the empiristically interpreted causal relation is 

 a formal functional one, which is not essentially different, as Ernst 

 Mach incidentally acknowledges, from the interdependence of the 

 sides and angles of a triangle. 



Here two extremes meet. Spinoza, the most consistent of the dog- 

 matic rationalists, finds himself compelled in his formulation of the 

 analytic interpretation of the causal relation handed down to him 

 to transform it into a mathematical one. Mach, the most consistent 

 of recent German empiricists, finds himself compelled to recognize 

 that the empirically synthetic relation between cause and effect 

 includes no other form of dependence than that which is present 

 in the functional mathematical relations. (In Germany empiricism 

 steeped in natural science has supplanted the naive materialism 

 saturated with natural science.) That the mathematical relations 

 must likewise be subjected to a purely empirical interpretation, 

 which even Hume denied them, is a matter of course. 



However, this agreement of two opposing views is no proof that 

 empiricism is on the right road. The empiristic conclusions to which 

 we have given our attention do not succeed in defining adequately 

 the specific nature of the causal relation; on the contrary, they 

 compel us to deny such a relation. Thus they cast aside the concept 

 that we have endeavored to define, that is, the judgment in which 

 we have to comprehend whatever is peculiar to the causal connection. 

 But one does not untie a knot by denying that it exists. 



It follows from this self-destruction of the empiristic causal hypo- 

 thesis that an additional element of thought must be contained in the 

 relation of cause and effect besides the elements of reproductive 

 recognition and those of identification and discrimination, all of 

 which are involved in the abstract comprehension of uniform se- 

 quence. The characteristics of the causal connection revealed by our 

 previous analysis constitute the necessary and perhaps adequate 

 conditions for combining the several factual perceptions into the 



1 Logic, bk. m, ch. v, 6. 



