178 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
face value. And here I wish to show how scientific explanatory concepts, 
together with concepts which the physical and biological sciences other 
than psychology usually reject, are all derived from immediate experience. 
ANALYSIS OF CONCEPT OF CAUSALITY. 
Perhaps one of the best ways of developing this thesis is to consider 
first the historical evolution of the notion of causality, which was invoked 
to account for movement or change in the physical universe. After the 
two exceedingly significant though somewhat naive conjectures of love 
and hatred, and of mind as causal principle in Nature, an analysis was 
made by Aristotle, as a consequence of which five explanatory concepts 
were considered necessary to show how any change or movement could 
come about. There were the two intrinsic principles constituting the 
thing to be changed. One of these—‘ matter "—was conceived to be an 
indeterminate though determinable principle, which endures throughout 
the process of change and is, before the alteration, specified in its particular 
mode of being by a determining principle—‘ form.’ Change means that 
a new form comes to actuate the matter ; and it involves also the negative 
concept of ‘ privation,’ since before the change the alterable thing is 
‘ deprived ’ of the mode of being it will exhibit after the alteration has taken 
place. Further than this, there are the two concepts of the agent which 
brings the change about, the ‘ efficient ’ cause extrinsic to the thing changed, 
and the reason why the agent acts, the end, goal or ‘ final ’ cause, towards 
the realisation of which the action is directed. Like the earlier attempts, 
this exceedingly acute analysis of causation, applied as it was to events in 
the external world, is an entirely anthropomorphic one. It reads into 
physical phenomena, in a conceptual manner, experiences which are 
wholly subjective. And this is at once apparent in all the examples that 
are brought forward to substantiate it. For instance, I, the agent or 
efficient cause, mould a thing, let us say wax, which is not now a sphere 
but a cube, into a spherical form, because I wish to have a sphere. Or 
I hew a formless block of marble into the shape of a statue. These are 
goal situations, in which an end must be intentionally set up before any 
action takes place ; something is consciously aimed at, or intended. 
Dr-ANTHROPOMORPHISATION OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 
Now, in the course of the development of scientific thought, first the 
concept of finality was jettisoned as not applicable to events in the physical 
universe : and certainly, though by analogy we can still apply that 
concept, derived from our own immediate experience of volitional activity, 
to the events of Nature, we are unable to discover it within the phenomena 
themselves by which Nature and its events are displayed to us. In those 
phenomena alone there is no indication of goal-seeking. The next con- 
cept to be dropped was that of efficiency, in the sense that one thing 
actually produces changes in others. And though, again by analogy, 
we can apply this concept also to the realities we believe to be sensorially 
presented to us, efficiency is in fact nowhere to be found in the phenomena. 
We are left, then, with sequences of antecedent and consequent, conceived 
