"Causal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shown the causal connection between political revolutions and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the psychological influences on a people's character exercised by the various extremes of climate—in both cases the first appearance of a ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... degrees, we shall see the perfection decrease, more and more, down to our sublunary world, in which the cycle of birth, growth and decay imitates and mars the original circle for the last time. So understood, the causal relation between God and the world is seen as an attraction when regarded from below, as an impulsion or a contact when regarded from above, since the first heaven, with its circular movement, is an imitation of God and all imitation is the reception ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... psychical events would have to be at least as clear as physical processes, but that is not admissible for many reasons. First of all, physical concomitants are rarely direct and unmeditated expressions of a psychical instant (e. g., clenching a fist in threatening). Generally they stand in no causal relation, so that explanations drawn from physiological, anatomical, or even atavistic conditions are only approximate and hypothetical. In addition, accidental habits and inheritances exercise an influence which, although it does not alter the expression, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... that wherein human reason is a real causal agent and where ideas are operative causes (of actions and their objects), that is to say, in the region of ethics, but also in regard to nature herself, Plato saw clear proofs of an origin from ideas. A plant, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Dionysius discusses the Divine Names (Div. Nom. i, iii) as implying some causal relation in God; for we name God, as he says, from creatures, as a cause from its effects. But goodness, since it has the aspect of desirable, implies the idea of a final cause, the causality of which is first among causes, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... follow crime as the thunder follows the lightning-flash. The murdered man's death-glazed eyes ought to be still open, when the murderer is dangling on the gallows. This was the demand of Panna's passionate heart, but also of her peasant-logic, which could comprehend the causal relation between sin and expiation clearly and palpably, only when both were united in a single melodramatic effect. Why was nothing heard of a final trial, of a condemnation? For what were the legal gentlemen waiting? Surely the case was as clear as sunlight, with no complication ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... non-scientific man occupies in such a conflict as in now going on over the doctrines of evolution. Professor Huxley was very careful not to repeat the error which delivered Professor Tyndall into the hands of the enemy at Belfast. He expressed no opinion as to the nature of the causal force which called the world into existence. He did not profess to know anything about the sources of life. He consequently did not once place himself on the level of the theologian or the unscientific spectator. What he undertook to do and did was to present to the audience some specimens of the ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... composition cannot be the final goal of zoology; there must follow on it a philosophical study of the differences between organic forms. The causes of these differences are to be found in the environment (pp. 66-7). Geoffroy seems here to be moving from a pure to a causal morphology. It is probable, he continues, that living species have descended by uninterrupted generation from the antediluvian species (p. 74), and that they have in the process ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... intrinsic / causal dependence health—wealth / coordination extrinsic / speech reminiscence ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... metaphysical, in virtue of which the predicted event is expected to follow the wholly unrelated augury. The other sort of superstition is that of which, as we have seen, Aunt Charlotte was an exemplification. Here, again, there is a splendid disregard of evidence, testimony, and causal laws. But it takes the form of scepticism, and a scepticism so blindly partial as to sink into the most abject credulity. The wildest sophistries are dragged in to account for an unfamiliar happening, and scientific students are accused, now of idiocy, ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... and so ad infinitum. Socrates is puzzled by this, and suggests that perhaps the Ideas are only notions in our minds. But to this it is replied that there is an end in that case of any reality in our ideas. Unless in some way they have a true and causal relation with something beyond our minds, there is an end of mind altogether, and with mind ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... That is why the introduction of "moral ideas" into politics serves the most immoral purposes and plays into the hands of the most immoral men. All ethics grow out of the mores and are a part of them. That is why the ethics never can be antecedent to the mores, and cannot be in a causal or productive relation to them. "The German people distinguishes only between customs and abuses [Sitten und Unsitten] without regard to their origin." They are quite right to do so, because the origin ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... whole effect contemplated. They overlooked the fact, that, in the consciousness of effort,—as in the attempt to control the action of mind, to command the attention, &c.,—we have direct and full evidence of power in action, which is necessarily causal in its nature. The mental nisus is true force, exerted with a foreknowledge of the effect to be produced, and necessarily followed by a result,—a partial one it may be,—but one which is a true effect, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... cultures which are brought into historical contact tend to assimilate in the long run, while neighboring languages assimilate each other only casually and in superficial respects[191], indicates that there is no profound causal relation between the development of language and the specific development of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... number of instances have been recorded of death resulting from tickling, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of the statement that Simon de Montfort, during the persecution of the Albigenses, put some of them to death by tickling the soles of their feet with a feather. An additional causal factor in the production of tickling may lie in the nature and structure of the nervous process involved in perception in general. According to certain histological researches of recent years we know that between the sense-organs and the central nervous system there exist closely connected chains ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... giving the time and the setting, it was necessary for him to bring in another element of the plot, Constance, and to go backward in time to pick up this thread of the story. The really essential order in any narrative is the order of cause and effect. As causes precede effects, the causal order and the time order generally coincide. In a single series of events, that is, where one cause alone produces an effect, which in turn becomes the cause of another effect, the time order is the causal order. In a novel, or a short story frequently, where there are more than one series of ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up. He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter: {32} he also waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the physical consequent. On this side his work was carried on by Hume. Berkeley resolved our knowledge into a succession of 'ideas.' He did, no doubt, fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if it were ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... we want you nevertheless to realize that, while as a matter of philosophic speculation you retain these opinions, you may at the same time for practical purposes regard the mind as an independent causal agency and believe that it can and does control and determine and cause any and every kind of bodily activity. We want you to do this because this conclusion is at the basis of a practical system of mental efficiency and because, as we shall at once show you, it is capable of proof by the established ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... likely to refute it in the minds of those who feel this necessity. Those who refuse to admit the possibility of "action at a distance," who insist on inventing a connecting material medium between every observed effect and some material object with which it seems to be in causal connection, will, I suppose, have to be allowed to exercise their ingenuity in any way to satisfy their minds, even though they may have to revise their theory with every fresh discovery in ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... association of sensations, so nauseous that it cannot be tolerated in after-life, illustrates clearly the way in which repugnances may be established by habitual association of feelings, without any belief in causal connexion; or rather, in spite of the knowledge that there is no causal connexion. Similarly with pleasurable emotions. The cawing of rooks is not in itself an agreeable sound: musically considered, it is very much the contrary. Yet the cawing of rooks usually produces in people feelings ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... trucking sense, or a free and uninfluenced force called a soul, or a 'desire for financial independence,' psychology has established a human being possessed of more instincts than any animal, and with a psychical nature whose activities fall completely within the causal law. ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 1869, there is a review by Professor Huxley of Dr. Haeckel's "Natuerlische Schoepfungsgeschichte," in which he says: "Professor Haeckel enlarges on the service which the 'Origin of Species' has done in favoring what he terms 'the causal or mechanical' view of living nature as opposed to the 'teleological or vitalistic' view. And no doubt it is quite true the doctrine of evolution is the most formidable of all the commoner and coarser forms of teleology. Perhaps the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... an important force in the social movements. Have there been any widespread, continuous, and successful movements for social justice outside of the territory influenced by Christianity? Was there any causal connection between the historic reformation and purification of Christianity since the sixteenth century and the rise of civil and social democracy? Does the spread of Christian ideas and feelings predispose ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... hoc may be taken as established; was it a propter hoc? Was the Union the cause as well as the antecedent of this decay? No economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to answer in the affirmative. The causal connection between two realities could not be more manifest. Let us examine it ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... harder to see through. Explanation, as we have seen, consists in constructing a plan or map in terms of such abstractions as classes and their relations, or sometimes, when the abstraction has been carried a step further, in terms simply of words or symbols, by means of which we represent the causal relations between such of the actual directly known facts as can be classified. This plan is more comprehensive and complete than the actual facts which we know directly in the ordinary course of things, for which it stands, and it enables us to explain these facts in terms of ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... to as "frankly admitting that the doctrine of the evolution of species is accepted by three-fourths of the scientific men," and that this doctrine has, in their minds, "rendered nugatory the hypothesis of a vital immaterial principle as a causal factor in the phenomena of life and mind." Allowing this statement its full force, it is still true that none but Atheists can possibly be included in the "three-fourths." So much the worse for them. But it is an Atheistic trick to ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... When the causal irritant has been excessively severe and the migration of leucocytes abundant, actual formation of pus may occur, the bony tissue being broken down and mingled with it, and an abscess cavity formed. In milder cases, affected and necrotic tissue is removed by a process of phagocytosis, and new tissue ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... world." There was a mystery about this disease, because, although unknown in the Arctic Circle, it appeared in temperate climates during the coldest months of the year. As I was able to prove in 1915, [8] it is a disease of civilisation. I found that the causal organism was killed in thirty minutes by a temperature of 62 deg. F. It was thus obvious that infection could never be carried by cold air. But in overcrowded rooms where windows are closed, and the temperature of warm, impure, saturated air was raised by the natural heat of the body to 80 deg. ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... of an epidemic ophthalmy. Although the eye affection was not as general as the typhus—it occurred only in some of the divisions, and then at the outset not so severely as later on—both evils were evidently related to each other by a common causal nexus. They appeared simultaneously under similar circumstances, but never attacked simultaneously the same individual. Whoever had ophthalmy was immune against typhus and vice versa, and this immunity furnished by one against the other evil lasted a long period of time. Both ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... has thought out for himself the implications of that doctrine. Dark and pressing enough before, this particular problem has, in appearance at least, been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism. If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of God which represented Him as outside the universe than with one ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the bulk of his labors to the two contiguous fields of Folklore and Art History. Folklore (Volkskunde) is here taken in his own definition, namely, as the science which uncovers the recondite causal relations between all perceptible manifestations of a nation's life and its physical and historical environment. Riehl never lost sight, in any of his distinctions, of that inalienable affinity between land and people; the solidarity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the one word "interaction" to describe the relation between material things and also the relation between mind and body, nor does he dwell upon the difference between the two. He insists that mind and matter stand in the one causal nexus; that a change in the outside world may be the cause of a perception coming into being in a mind, and that a volition may be the cause of ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... In his cool and causal way he admired Mary Standish. She was very quiet, and he liked her because of that. He could not, of course, escape the beauty of her eyes or the shimmering luster of the long lashes that darkened them. But these were details which did not thrill him, but merely pleased him. And her hair pleased ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... cosmological proof of God approaches him through the attribute of creative omnipotence. The common principle of causal explanation refers the origin of natural events to similar antecedent events. But there must be some first cause from which the whole series is derived, a cause which is ultimate, sufficient to ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection. The same thing has happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of action that they have been always held to be. We still say, "I gave him 5 pounds because I felt pleased with him, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... agreed. That they have any absolute existence even is far from certain. They are relative to man in his many limitations, and represent for him the constant expression of what he may always expect to find in the world around him. But that they have any causal connection with the things around him is not to be conceived. The Natural Laws originate nothing, sustain nothing; they are merely responsible for uniformity in sustaining what has been originated and what ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... links, the problem for intelligence is so to enunciate every element, and so to repeat the connexion that we may finally grasp all the links of the chain in one. In this way we, as it were, bring the causal or primal term and its remotest dependent immediately together, and raise a derivative knowledge into one which is primary and intuitive. Such are the four points of Cartesian method:—(1) Truth requires a clear and distinct conception of its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... significant amount of forced labor; ethnic insurgent groups also used compulsory labor of adults and unlawful recruitment of children; the military junta's gross economic mismanagement, human rights abuses, and its policy of using forced labor are the top causal factors for Burma's significant trafficking problem tier rating: Tier 3 - Burma does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so; military and civilian officials remain ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... England came to an end. During the twenty years which had elapsed since the voyage of the Mayflower, the population had grown to 26,000 souls. Of this number scarcely 500 had arrived before 1629. It is a striking fact, since it expresses a causal relation and not a mere coincidence, that the eleven years, 1629-1640, during which Charles I. governed England without a parliament, were the same eleven years that witnessed the planting of New England. For more than a century after this there was no considerable migration to this part of ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... psychological terms, but the whole meaning which they attach to these terms, feeling, emotion, will, desire, pleasure, displeasure, joy, and pain, is essentially different from that which controls the causal explanations of scientific psychology. We cannot enter into the real fundamental questions here, which are too often carelessly ignored even in scientific quarters. Too often psychology is treated, even by psychologists, as if it covered every possible systematic treatment ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... noblemen, and where all society was based on one broad level of brotherly love and natural equality. Indeed, Mr Norris the father gradually expanding into an oration on this swelling theme, was becoming tedious, when Mr Bevan diverted his thoughts by happening to make some causal inquiry relative to the occupier of the next house; in reply to which, this same Mr Norris the father observed, that 'that person entertained religious opinions of which he couldn't approve; and therefore he hadn't the honour of knowing the gentleman.' Mrs Norris ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... in the following words of this sentence, to answer to the causal "for that," Jallalo'ddin supposes something to be understood to complete the sense, as "therefore we have ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... permitted, and if I supposed that you would all care to go with me into matters of some abstruseness, I could certainly prove that whatever the connexion between body and mind may be, we have the best possible reasons for concluding that it is not a causal connexion. These reasons are, of course, extra-physiological; but they are not on this account less conclusive. Within the limits of a lecture, however, I can only undertake to give an outline sketch of what I take to be the overwhelming argument ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Bertrand Russell, "practically everything that is distinctive both of their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent influence of the past": and most actions and responses "can only be brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history of the organism as part of the causes of the present response."[127] The phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general law. As that which we have perceived conditions what we can now perceive, so that which ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... end voluntarily (which is virtue) or kicking against the pricks (which is vice), the sum total of his accomplishments is not altered by his choice: ducunt volentern fata, nolentem trahunt. On the other hand, Vergil's master, while he affirms the causal nexus for ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... delicate a texture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a tougher scabbard; the river, not content with channel and restraining banks, overflows perpetually; the extortionate exacting armies of the Ideal and the Causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace: I write these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase; I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... is dependent upon appetite quite as much as upon the nature of the food. Better a simple repast with good appetite than sumptuous fare with bad digestion. There is indeed a causal relationship between simplicity and health. The savage likes the noise of the tom-tom or the clatter of wooden instruments: what a contrast this is to the trained ear of the musician. Uncivilised man has little enjoyment of scenery or of animal life, except as in respect ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... According to Sir J.A.H. Murray (see Letter in The Times, 12th of May 1908) "to lie," an intransitive verb, becomes transitive when combined with a preposition, e.g. a nurse lies over a child or overlies a child; "to lay" is the causal derivative of "to lie," and is followed by two objects, e.g. to lay the table with a cloth, or to lay a cloth on the table; similarly, to overlay a surface with varnish, or to overlay a child with a blanket, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the school and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business and politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the motives that have impelled my actions, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... less than that of all its other states, is to be sought in bodily changes, the seat of which can only be placed in the brain. And, as Locke had already done with less effect, he states and refutes the arguments commonly brought against the possibility of a causal connexion between the modes of motion of the cerebral substance and states ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... theory of the intimate relation between temperature and crime, it may be urged that the greater prevalence of crimes of blood in hot latitudes is a mere coincidence and not a causal connection. This is the view taken by Dr. Mischler in Baron von Holtzendorff's "Handbuch des Gefaengnisswesens." He says the real reason crimes of blood are more common in the South of Europe than in the North is to be attributed ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... followed by the indicative or the subjunctive cum CAUSAL since, followed by the subjunctive cum CONCESSIVE although, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... to have been incapable of inflection, agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas, and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter, or even causal), adverb, and conjunction. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... had grasped at idol after idol to rescue him; 'but they were the ruin of him, and of all Israel.' How difficult it is to hammer plain truths, even with the mallet of troubles, into men's heads! How blind we all are to the causal connection between sin and sorrow! Hezekiah saw the iron link uniting them, and his whole policy was based upon that 'wherefore.' Of course, if we accept the Biblical statements as to the divine dealing with Israel and Judah, obedience and disobedience ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Indeed, without in the least intending it, she might awaken a spirit that would assert itself in ways as yet undreamed of by either of them. The causes which start men upon their careers are often seemingly the most slight and causal. Mildred meant nothing more than to find a brief and kindly-natured pastime in softening the hard lives and in rounding the sharp angles of the Atwood family, and Roger merely came in for his share of her attention. Flesh and spirit, however, are not wood and stone, and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... tapeworm, and a few other intestinal worms, little if anything was known of morbific parasites before the Nineteenth Century; but the labors of Van Beneden, Kuechenmeister, Cobbold, Manson, Laveran, and others have now established the causal relationship between great numbers of animal parasites—gross and microscopic—and certain definite morbid states. This has led to a great increase in our knowledge of the connection between the parasites of the lower animals and grave disease in human beings, and on this knowledge ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... CAUSALITY OF ACTUAL GRACE.—If grace is a supernatural help, mere nature cannot, of its own strength, perform salutary acts. Consequently, actual grace exercises a causal influence without which man would be helpless ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... 'invariable antecedence.' Brown traces the various confusions which have obscured the true nature of this belief. He insists especially that we can no more discover power in mental than in physical sequences. The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions. The hypothesis of 'power' has been really the source of 'illusion.' The tendency to personify ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... a Distance contrasted with Transmitted Action.—In the mechanical processes which we can experimentally modify at will, and which therefore we learn to apprehend with greatest fulness, whenever an effect on a body, B, is in causal connexion with a process instituted in another body, A, it is usually possible to discover a mechanical connexion between the two bodies which allows the influence of A to be traced all the way across the intervening region. The question thus arises whether, in electric attractions ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... development, or the monistic progenesis-hypothesis, is the one only scientific theory which affords a rational interpretation of the whole universe and satisfies the craving of our human reason for causality, by bringing all natural phenomena into a mechanical causal-connection as parts of a great uniform process of evolution. II. The theory of transmutation, or descent, is an essential and indispensable element in the monistic development hypothesis, because it is the one only ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... agents is giving way to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the way for science. Alchemy leads ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... all-comprehending whole, the first principle, is said to be all things prior to all; priority here denoting exempt transcendency. As the monad and the centre of a circle are images from their simplicity of this greatest of principles, so likewise do they perspicuously shadow forth to us its causal comprehension of all things. For all number may be considered as subsisting occultly in the monad, and the circle in the centre; this occult being the same ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... sense of giving insight they have no theoretic value, for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the flux, or with the causes that govern its direction. Instead of being interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether. They make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things incomprehensible. No real activities and indeed no real connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic; for to be distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... learn from art the chief secret of life: the secret of action and reaction, of causal connection, of suitability of part to part, of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... light, medullation was premature and imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... ado goes forward here to-day, If I may read the Immanent Intent From signs and tokens blent With weird unrest along the firmament Of causal coils in passionate display. —Look narrowly, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... this is that the faculty of similarity and the faculty of contiguity do not give the distinction, necessary as it is, between resemblances and co-existences which are significant and those which are not. The causal nexus between two phenomena is not perceived as something apart and sui generis; it is not even perceived at all. We perceive only their relation in time and space, and it is our mind which raises a succession to the height ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... urge more attention to light and to reading position, more rest, more play, more hand work, less home study and less eye work at school, rather than more eyeglasses to conceal temporarily the effect of abusing children's eyes. Putting glasses on children without changing causal conditions is like giving alcohol to consumptives. The feeling of relief is ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... our power and of feeling its expansion, or to the pitiable feeling of our shackled, enfeebled power, leads us directly to the motor elements that are the fundamental conditions of invention. Above all, in this personal feeling, there is the satisfaction of being a causal factor, i.e., a creator, and every creator has a consciousness of his superiority over non-creators. However petty his invention, it confers upon him a superiority over those who have invented nothing. Although we have ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... it at all may develop it by exercise. A simple and common-sensible exercise is to seize hold of some event that happens in our daily lives, and then think back over all the antecedent events we can remember, until we discern which ones among them stand in a causal relation to the event we are considering. Next, it will be well to look forward and imagine the sort of events which will logically carry on the series. The great generals of history have won their most signal victories by an exercise of the narrative sense. Holding ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... the door to, superinduce, evoke, entail, operate; elicit, provoke. conduce to &c. (tend to) 176; contribute; have a hand in the pie, have a finger in the pie; determine, decide, turn the scale; have a common origin; derive its origin &c. (effect) 154. Adj. caused &c. v; causal, original; primary, primitive, primordial; aboriginal; protogenal[obs3]; radical; embryonic, embryotic[obs3]; in embryo, in ovo[Lat]; seminal, germinal; at the bottom of; connate, having a common origin. Adv. because ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... philosophers so anxious to conserve the ethical consequences of life? Is it not because they feel that there is something in man which will not fit into a rigid world-mechanism, and that conduct would cease {84} to have moral worth if life were reduced to a causal series of happenings? But it may be further argued that, if the mechanical conception of life, which reduces the spiritual to the natural, were consistently carried out it would lead not merely to the destruction of the moral life, but to the destruction of science itself. If man is merely ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... knowledge of nature would be a mere tabulation of co-existences and sequences. We should still believe in the succession of day and night, of summer and winter; but the conception of Force would vanish from our universe; causal relations would disappear, and with them that science which is now binding the parts of nature to an ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Self in the character of its inward Ruler; and is not founded on unity of substance of the pervading principle and the world pervaded. The phrase 'consists of' (-maya) does not refer to an effect (so that the question asked would be as to the causal substance of which this world is an effect), for a separate question on this point would be needless. Nor does the—maya express, as it sometimes does-e.g. in the case of prana-maya [FOOTNOTE 92:1], the own sense of the word to which it is attached; for in that ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... seeks after operative causes, at the beginning of the century regarded creation as a multiplicity of phenomena without any causal connection as to their origin. Darwin taught as a fundamental principle the unity and the causal inter-relation of creation, but was not entirely able to save this hypothesis from a violent and sudden death. In the future sketch creation will appear as wholly restricted in itself and lasting, ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... methods of scientific research had not as yet been distinctly formulated, it was in previous generations the usual habit of mind to refer any natural phenomenon, the physical causation of which had not been ascertained, to the more or less immediate causal action of the Deity. But we now see that this habit of mind arose from a failure to distinguish between the essentially distinct characters of Science and Religion as departments of thought, and therefore ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... distinction, which is in practice no distinction at all; he regards induction and analogy as generically the same, though differing in the demonstrative validity of their evidence, i.e. induction proceeds on the basis of scientific, causal connexion, while analogy, in absence of proof, temporarily accepts a probable hypothesis. In this sense, analogy may obviously have a universal conclusion. This type of inference is of the greatest value in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... gravitation that first assigned a cause for gravity by interpreting it as action at a distance, proceeding from masses. Newton's theory is probably the greatest stride ever made in the effort towards the causal nexus of natural phenomena. And yet this theory evoked a lively sense of discomfort among Newton's contemporaries, because it seemed to be in conflict with the principle springing from the rest of experience, that there can be reciprocal action only through ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... needs not experience," says a third. "If you took the true way, your destiny would be accomplished, in a purer and more natural order. You would not learn through facts of thought or action, but express through them the certainties of wisdom. In quietness yield thy soul to the causal soul. Do not disturb thy apprenticeship by premature effort; neither check the tide of instruction by methods of thy own. Be still; seek not, but wait in obedience. Thy ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the causal connexion, I hold to be equally essential to Tragedy and every serious drama, because all the mental powers act and react upon each other, and if the Understanding be compelled to take a leap, Imagination ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Hobbes, Cowley, Tillotson, Dryden and Sprat remodelled English prose. And in the meantime, if this account is to be accepted, while English verse and English prose were in the melting-pot, this splendid efflorescence was an accident, a by-product, without meaning or causal virtue in the chemical process ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... "organizable protoplasm" was reached, which, by evolution, climbed up to man. 'Tis God we see in the family, in society, in the state, in all religions, up to the highest outflowings of Christianity. 'Tis Him we see in art, literature, and science; and so proclaims Evolution. "God is the universal causal law; God is the source of all force and all matter." "For us," says Haeckel, "all nature is animated, i. e., penetrated with Divine spirit, with law, and with necessity." We know of no matter without this ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... a capital, and end with some other plainly seen mark, it would be difficult to distinguish one sentence from another, so as to read. Statements in geography were long based on authority, like those in grammar; in fact, only very recently has the causal idea become prominent in geography. High-school students of physics very generally want to know what the teacher wishes them to see in an experiment before feeling sure what they do see; and college students of politics, rather than depend upon the evidence itself, are inclined ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... final causes altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage. Here his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise Montesquieu and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods. Voltaire concerned himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... permanent stock of capital goods as the fishing community of our illustration possesses would enable it to get its food, the fish, day by day, by working in different ways and using the permanent stock. If we call this permanent supply of canoes, etc., capital, it is, in a causal way, mediate wealth, though it is not so in point of time. Some labor is spent each day on it, and itself creates each day some consumers' wealth. These two operations go on simultaneously, and ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... no more force than y in this type of phrase. Probably this use arose from the causal ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... blended, and reciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;—where primary results undergo endless modifications from the influence of surrounding circumstances, and the reaction of social and political institutions;—and where each individual of the great aggregate wields a causal power that obeys no specific law, and by his own inherent power sets in motion new trains of causes which can not be reduced to statistics, we grant that we are in possession of no instrument of exact analysis by which the complex phenomena of national character may be ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression. For ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... every particular effect and no other, and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow Rest will come. The Christian life is not casual, but causal. All nature is a standing protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any effects, without the employment of appropriate causes. The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, "Do ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... act once more as we have always acted—MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... until the [Pg 437] time of the promised salvation had come." As regards the following enumeration of the blessings, in and by the bestowal of which the new covenant-relation is to be established, Venema very correctly remarks: "The blessings are distinguished into radical or causal ones, and subsequent or derived ones." The second [Hebrew: ki], in ver. 34: "For I will forgive their sin," proves the correctness of this division, which is also pointed out by the Athnach.—[Hebrew: tvrh] is, by many interpreters, here understood ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... In close causal connection with Hoelderlin's Weltschmerz is his belief that his life is ruled by an inexorable fate whose plaything he is. "Wenn hinfort mich das Schicksal ergreift, und von einem Abgrund in den andern mich wirft, und alle Kraefte in mir ertraenkt ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.[54] ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and without whom they could not occur. It is thus obvious that there is a definite connection between these phenomena and life, which can hardly be due to chance; it must stand in some intimate and causal relation.[9] ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... RESTRICTS ASSOCIATIONS.—By its teaching of standard methods, Scientific Management restricts association, and thus gains in the speed with which associated ideas arise.[36] Insistence on causal sequence is a great aid. This is rendered by the Systems, which give the reasons, and make the standard ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... agrees with this in holding to the reality of something external, regarding this as antecedent to and therefore as independent of the particular mind which receives the sense-impression. Again, he assumes the uniformity of nature, the universality of the causal relation, and so on. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... in the substance of the whole; and everything formal [causal] is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... a long time believed to be inevitably fatal; it is now known that a small proportion of patients with this disease recover. Children occasionally suffer from it, but it is generally a disease of middle adult life. Chorea may bear an apparent causal relation to ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D. |
