Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/136

120, and endeavor to account for its different manifestations under differentials of condition historically presented.

This whole matter may indeed be summed up in terms of the conception of causation. If we assume the meaning of this notion to be a relation of antecedent and consequent, we cannot play fast and loose with it. The cause is not merely an antecedent; it is what it is as antecedent, and cannot be regarded as real when severed from that which succeeds it. The same holds of the consequent—it is what it is only as a term in the series. But we do more than place the antecedent and consequent. We get the continuous reality. And then the entire series, the defined and historic event, is itself employed to interpret and construct a larger realm of experience. Through the series we better apprehend the universe. It is that which is characterized by and through such a history. The historic consequence is a predicate of a new subject.

We get a more thorough and adequate experience of the antecedents, H and O, and of the consequent, water, in finding out how water is generated. But we do not stop at this point. The entire sequence to which both antecedence and consequence belong, becomes an important factor in realizing the nature of the world in which such an event takes place. Our drama becomes in turn a significant episode in a larger drama. So in moral matters we comprehend both the animal instinct and the human categorical imperative when we place them as limiting terms of a single continuous history. But over and above this, we understand better the universe, knowing that it is of a kind to be marked by such a history. It is in the light of such a more ultimate judgment, made possible by the evolutionary method, that we see how limited is the view that tells us that history can only speak of certain external things that have happened to morality; can trace its outward fortunes, but reveal nothing of its nature. It shows us morality in the position which it occupies in the universe; in the situations that demand it.

Having found in the apprehension of process, the reality which eludes us when we look for it either in earlier or later terms, we have to be careful to avoid a further error, viz: the confusion of