Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/42

 transcendental law of cause and effect in Nature, persistently mistaking one for the other. In the 9th Book "Adversus Mathematicos," that is, the Book "Adversus Physicos," 204, he undertakes to prove the law of causality, and says : "He who asserts that there is no cause (αίτία), either has no cause (αίτία) for his assertion, or has one. In the former case there is not more truth in his assertion than in its contradiction ; in the latter, his assertion itself proves the existence of a cause."

By this we see that the Ancients had not yet arrived at a clear distinction between requiring a reason as the ground of a conclusion, and asking for a cause for the occurrence of a real event. As for the Scholastic Philosophers of later times, the law of causality was in their eyes an axiom above investigation : "non inquirimus an causa sit,quia nihil est per se notius" says Suarez. At the same time they held fast to the above quoted Aristotelian classification ; but, as far as I know at least, they equally failed to arrive at a clear idea of the necessary distinction of which we are here speaking.

§ 7. Descartes.
For we find even the excellent Descartes, who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account ; and we shall soon see to what serious and deplorable consequences these confusions have led with regard to Metaphysics. In the "Responsio ad secundas objectiones in meditationes de prima philosophia" axioma i. he says : ''Nulla res existit, de qua non possit qæri, quænam sit causa, cur existat. Hoc enim de ipso Deo quæri potest, non quod indigeat ulla causa ut existat'',