Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/125

 this that we assume intermediate unobserved states. Continuity is also not sufficient, since we can, for example, pass by sensibly continuous gradations from any one drop of the sea to any other drop. The utmost we can say is that discontinuity during uninterrupted observation is as a rule a mark of difference between things, though even this cannot be said in such cases as sudden explosions.

The assumption of continuity is, however, successfully made in physics. This proves something, though not anything of very obvious utility to our present problem: it proves that nothing in the known world is inconsistent with the hypothesis that all changes are really continuous, though from too great rapidity or from our lack of observation they may not always appear continuous. In this hypothetical sense, continuity may be allowed to be a necessary condition if two appearances are to be classed as appearances of the same thing. But it is not a sufficient condition, as appears from the instance of the drops in the sea. Thus something more must be sought before we can give even the roughest definition of a “thing.”

What is wanted further seems to be something in the nature of fulfilment of causal laws. This statement, as it stands, is very vague, but we will endeavour to give it precision. When I speak of “causal laws,” I mean any laws which connect events at different times, or even, as a limiting case, events at the same time provided the connection is not logically demonstrable. In this very general sense, the laws of dynamics are causal laws, and so are the laws correlating the simultaneous appearances of one “thing” to different senses. The question is: How do such laws help in the definition of a “thing”?

To answer this question, we must consider what it is that is proved by the empirical success of physics. What is proved is that its hypotheses, though unverifiable