Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/260

1925] to defend it). Causation is not necessarily the transmission of motion, but of change which is not necessarily motion (though some hold that it is). The effect is a change in a thing, and its cause lies in antecedent changes in other things. When we speak of energy, we mean the transmission of change from one thing to another, and the “force” with which the change asserts itself. The real questions before us are: what is it that makes the change in the antecedent thing, and why does it pass over from that thing into another? To be sure, it is not enough to say that one change always follows another—there must be some reason for it. Hence some assume that “force” is a real substantial something which passes out of one thing into another. Or it may be the case, that all changes are so correlated in the absolute as means towards absolute Good that every change follows another in virtue of this universal correlativity. Hence all causality will lie ultimately in the absolute—which is the theory of universal relativity. But this question does not concern as here. What concerns us, is the source of that Energy in the Self which is followed by activity in the organism and change in external things—the energy of Volition. First, then,

Why do things change? But granted that Self has energy to produce change, the question remains; why should there be any such thing as change? Seeing that the meaning of energy is that it produces change, the great question comes to be: what is the meaning of change? Why should there be any change in the universe at all? Granted that there must be a self-existent world of being, why should it not remain always the same in eternal rest? Why is it a world of “striving and straining” to become something different? Why is it not a world of being so much as a world of becoming? Again, all force is the doing of something; there must therefore be something requiring to be