Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/240

 these errors that Mach and others have urged a purely “descriptive” view of physics: physics, they say, does not aim at telling us “why” things happen, but only “how” they happen. And if the question “why?” means anything more than the search for a general law according to which a phenomenon occurs, then it is certainly the case that this question cannot be answered in physics and ought not to be asked. In this sense, the descriptive view is indubitably in the right. But in using causal laws to support inferences from the observed to the unobserved, physics ceases to be purely descriptive, and it is these laws which give the scientifically useful part of the traditional notion of “cause.” There is therefore something to preserve in this notion, though it is a very tiny part of what is commonly assumed in orthodox metaphysics.

In order to understand the difference between the kind of cause which science uses and the kind which we naturally imagine, it is necessary to shut out, by an effort, everything that differentiates between past and future. This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, because our mental life is so intimately bound up with difference. Not only do memory and hope make a difference in our feelings as regards past and future, but almost our whole vocabulary is filled with the idea of activity, of things done now for the sake of their future effects. All transitive verbs involve the notion of cause as activity, and would have to be replaced by some cumbrous periphrasis before this notion could be eliminated.

Consider such a statement as, “Brutus killed Caesar.” On another occasion, Brutus and Caesar might engage our attention, but for the present it is the killing that we have to study. We may say that to kill a person is to cause his death intentionally. This means that desire