Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/239

 and therefore could not be expected to realise that induction itself, their own darling, required a logical principle which obviously could not be proved inductively, and must therefore be a priori if it could be known at all.

The view that the law of causality itself is a priori cannot, I think, be maintained by anyone who realises what a complicated principle it is. In the form which states that “every event has a cause” it looks simple; but on examination, “cause” is merged in “causal law,” and the definition of a “causal law” is found to be far from simple. There must necessarily be some a priori principle involved in inference from the existence of one thing to that of another, if such inference is ever valid; but it would appear from the above analysis that the principle in question is induction, not causality. Whether inferences from past to future are valid depends wholly, if our discussion has been sound, upon the inductive principle: if it is true, such inferences are valid, and if it is false, they are invalid.

IV. I come now to the question how the conception of causal laws which we have arrived at is related to the traditional conception of cause as it occurs in philosophy and common sense.

Historically, the notion of cause has been bound up with that of human volition. The typical cause would be the fiat of a king. The cause is supposed to be “active,” the effect “passive.” From this it is easy to pass on to the suggestion that a “true” cause must contain some prevision of the effect; hence the effect becomes the “end” at which the cause aims, and teleology replaces causation in the explanation of nature. But all such ideas, as applied to physics, are mere anthropomorphic superstitions. It is as a reaction against