482 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



This view of existence was instilled into all of us in our child- 

 hood, and is embedded in the language we must all use. 



24. However erroneous (see § 9, and the warning given on 

 p. 477) this crude noiimenal hypothesis may be, each of the two 

 parts of which it consists appears to have a partial basis in truth. 

 We have already embodied in the fifth of our postulates the frag- 

 ment of truth that may be extracted (mixed with error) from the 

 conception of material substances (see that postulate and the last 

 paragraph of the Introduction). The second part of the hypothesis 

 has reference to forces supposed to surround and act on these 

 substances, and a study of these is instructive. The conception of 

 force as commonly entertained by scientific men contains this 

 important element of truth, that a true causal connexion does 

 exist which determines the concomitant events that take place in 

 Nature — the changes which will simultaneously occur among the 

 shadows cast by the great machine. 



25. This causal connection is represented in Diagram IV. If 

 true causation operates between two auta, A and B, when they 

 stand in a suitable relation, R, to one another, they and their 

 causal relations to one another and to other auta undergo change ; 

 and an event will thus have taken place in the Autic Universe. 

 Should the auta that are concerned be sense- compelling auta, the 

 effects they can produce in human minds, the as and /3's of the 

 diagram, will be different after the change from what they were 

 before ; and the syntheta that these effects will form when com- 

 pacted together, the phenomenal objects, will be different before 

 the event and after it, i. e. a, b, and r of the diagram will undergo 

 change, and become a', b', and /. Thus the true causal connection 

 between the antecedent state of Nature, and that which follows it, 

 passes, as it were, over the bridge of the diagram. Accordingly, 

 a force, which is usually regarded as a cause of dynamical change 

 in Nature, is in reality of the nature of a symbol, a symbol 

 which stands for 1 the indirect causal connection described above. 



1 In the science of dynamics it is immaterial what it stands for, since in that 

 science we are only concerned with the direction and amount of the change which a 

 certain shadow undergoes when the cause symbolized by the force has been operating 

 jn the autic universe, and has altered that part of it which casts this shadow. As to 

 the meaning of a shadow and of casting a shadow, see foot-note 2, p. 510, and Part 

 V., p. 522. See also Diagram IV., p. 487. 



