Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/21

] yet leading to the opposite conclusion (the antithesis). The validity of each argument and their mutual contradiction destroy both.

The thesis states the Platonic insight which has been such a solid comfort to the race for the past twenty centuries. It says: "Causality, according to the laws of nature, is not the only causality from which the phenomena of the world can be deduced. There is besides a causality, that of freedom, which is necessary to account for those phenomena." Kant leads to this insight by showing what is involved in the other theory. Every event presupposes a previous condition, from which, if existent, it must follow as a necessary result. Now, if that state or condition had always been, this event would also have always existed. Hence the causality of a cause that produces an event must be itself an event, or, in other words, it must be something that has just now come to be. Hence we are compelled to look beyond it for another cause and thus again forever. But, says Kant, "There would be no completeness of the series of causes," at this rate. For he sees that the cause which we reach in our search is never the originator of any determination or effect. It is, in fact, only a transmitter. Hence it belongs to the effect and not to the true cause. We are discovering only agents and passive instruments, and therefore adding only to the effect in our search for the cause. No one of this series of antecedent events can be the first cause: hence the whole series consists of effects that do not originate any new impulse whatever. Let each one of them originate something, and we could soon come to the end of our series and explain the origination of the entire event. But since no previous event originates anything it is clear that the entire series is empty of causality.

This last result, however, Kant does not see; he sees only that "the causality of nature cannot be the only kind of causality," and is willing to admit that the series of events devoid of all origination of new determinations is one kind of causality. He concludes, therefore, that there is a second species of causality. He says, namely, "an absolute