Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/83

 equally certain truths, this eternity of Matter (called the permanence of substance) is forbidden fruit for professors of philosophy; so they slip past it with a bashful, sidelong glance.

By the endless chain of causes and effects which directs all changes but never extends beyond them, two existing things remain untouched, precisely because of the limited range of its action: on the one hand, Matter, as we have just shown; on the other hand, the primary forces of Nature. The first (matter) remains uninfluenced by the causal nexus, because it is that which undergoes all changes, or on which they take place; the second (the primary forces), because it is they alone by which changes or effects become possible ; for they alone give causality to causes, i.e. the faculty of operating, which the causes therefore hold as mere vassals a fief. Cause and effect are changes connected together to necessary succession in Time; whereas the forces of Nature by means of which all causes operate, are exempt from all change; in this sense therefore they are outside Time, but precisely on that account they are always and everywhere in reserve, omnipresent and inexhaustible, ever ready to manifest themselves, as soon as an opportunity presents itself in the thread of causality. A cause, like its effect, is invariably something individual, a single change; whereas a force of Nature is something universal, unchangeable, present at all times and in all places. The attraction of a thread by amber, for instance, at the present moment, is an effect; its cause is the preceding friction and actual contact of the amber with the thread; and the force of Nature which acts in, and presides over, the process, is Electricity. The explanation of this matter is to be found in my chief work, and there I have shown in a long chain of causes and effects