"Causation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Mrs. Harmon would convince the most negative of agnostics that there was an overruling Providence, if nothing else did," said Sewell. "It's so defiant of all law, so delightfully independent of causation." ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present,—and which we call 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation,—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological specialists ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... beginning, or are now. This is not only true of the "germs" that are "in themselves upon the earth," but of every living thing, whether lying within or beyond the telescopic or microscopic limits. As a law of causation, as well as of consecutive thought, there must be in the order of life (all life) a continuous chain of ideas linking the past to the present, the present to the future, and the future to eternity. But that this continuous chain is dependent on mere physical changes or manifestations, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... matter of opinion or theory—such theory resting indeed on a foundation of ascertained facts—but being in itself a mere inference more or less probable from those facts. Even if it were proved to be a true account of the causation of those facts, it would be by no means certain that other facts, however similar, might not have had a ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... of interest, not only to the student of medicine, but to the lay-observer as well. In olden times there were many opinions concerning its causation, all of which, until the era of physiologic investigation, were of superstitious derivation. Believing menstruation to be the natural means of exit of the feminine bodily impurities, the ancients always thought a menstruating woman was to be shunned; her very presence ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... have sojourned to some perfectly innocent act on their part, or merely to their presence, or to some strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the meeting of a magpie at setting out and a fruitless errand following, or between a certain ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... There is some appearance of loss of simplicity, but the gain is real. As was said above, the time is not ripe for the discussion of the origin of species. With faith in Evolution unshaken—if indeed the word faith can be used in application to that which is certain—we look on the manner and causation of adapted differentiation as still wholly mysterious. As Samuel Butler so truly said: "To me it seems that the 'Origin of Variation,' whatever it is, is the only true 'Origin of Species'" ("Life and Habit", London, page 263, 1878.), ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,—its cardinal idea,—that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge":[64] our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... seemed to doubt that birds could worry people so, But, bless him! since I ate the bird, I guess I ought to know! The acidous condition of my stomach, so he said, Bespoke a vinous irritant that amplified my head, And, ergo, the causation of the thing, as he inferred, Was the large cold bottle, not the small ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... whirlwind could scoop up a pond, tadpoles and all—because tadpoles are more numerous in their season than are the frogs in theirs: but the tadpole-season is earlier in the spring, or in a time that is more tempestuous. Thinking in terms of causation—as if there were real causes—our notion is that, if X is likely to cause Y, but is more likely to cause Z, but does not cause Z, X is not the cause of Y. Upon this quasi-sorites, we base our acceptance that the little frogs that have fallen to this earth are not products ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... the book, though not astonishing, like Sir William Hamilton's, is sufficient and always at the author's service. The text throughout, and especially the notes on Causation, Predestination, Original Sin, and Necessary Truths, will amply support our opinion. But better than either learning or logic is that noble and devout spirit pervading every page, and convincing the reader, that, whether the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... by His will; but that He produced the creature by His will. Whence in the book De Synod., it is said: "If anyone say that the Son was made by the Will of God, as a creature is said to be made, let him be anathema." The reason of this is that will and nature differ in their manner of causation, in such a way that nature is determined to one, while the will is not determined to one; and this because the effect is assimilated to the form of the agent, whereby the latter acts. Now it is manifest that of one thing there is only one natural form whereby ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Objects of Terror, which precedes Montmorenci, a Fragment, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is "excited by the interference of a simple, material causation," and which "requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure." He condemns Walpole's Mysterious Mother on the ground that the catastrophe is only productive of horror ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... thunder-storm. It was, perhaps, the thunder-storm that really deserves the blame for Missy's climactic athletic catastrophe. No lightning-bolt struck, yet that thunder-storm indubitably played its part in Missy's athletic destiny. It was the causation of renewed turmoil after ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the account in Kings. It is a question whether the Old Testament at large is not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically, by "natural causes"; including a causation by deliberate, elaborate, and ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... "The causation of beautiful singing can only be found through a pure and velvety production of the voice, and this is acquired in no other way than by a thorough understanding of what constitutes a perfect beginning—that is the attack or start of the tone. If the tone has ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... lowering the life of thought, in order to elevate that of fancy. The origin of aestheticism is the same as that of mysticism. Both proceed from a rebellion against the predominance of the abstract sciences and against the undue abuse of the principle of causation in metaphysic. When we pass from the stuffed animals of the zoological museums, from anatomical reconstructions, from tables of figures, from classes and sub-classes constituted by means of abstract characters, or from the fixation and mechanization of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... universe, a genesis, a perpetual becoming, an entrance into existence, and an exit thence; the Theist is, therefore, perfectly justified in regarding it as disqualified for self-existence, and in passing behind it for the Supreme Entity that needs no cause. Phenomena demand causation, entities dispense with it. No one asks for a cause of the space which contains the universe, or of the Eternity on the bosom of which it floats. Everywhere the line is necessarily drawn upon the same principle; that entities may have self-existence, phenomena ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... certain philosophers that this superposition of the relations of space, time, causation, etc., on the products of our dream-fancy is due to the fact that all experience arises by a synthesis of mental forms with the chaotic matter of sense-impressions. These philosophers allow, however, that all particular ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of this kind. The universality of the law of causation—in other words, the uniform course of nature—is the fundamental principle on which all induction proceeds, the great premise on which all our science is founded. But if this law itself be the result ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... which he finds himself? Alas! facts prove, however, that all things are transitory, and that change of condition is the constant and necessary result of that motion which is the chief instrument of eternal causation, but which, in causing all phenomena, wears out existing organizations while it is generating new ones. In the motions of the earth as a planet, doubtless are to be discovered the superior causes which convert seas into continents, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... importance of the political causation of warfare, the whole problem of the ultimate fate of war becomes at once more hopeful. The orderly growth and stability of nations has in the past seemed to demand war. But war is not the only method of securing these ends, and to most people nowadays it scarcely seems ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... deceiving themselves so far as to believe that they could logically hold to it; but I declare that they have never succeeded in convincing any unprejudiced mind, and I defy any logician to prove that the conclusion of free will as consistent with eternal causation, is less absurd than that two and two ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... also awakened by the fact that, as a rule, mental healers have not regularly studied pathology, nor even anatomy. But it will be seen that if the principle of mental causation for disease is once admitted, mentality rather than physiology should furnish the field for operations. In order to heal, the mind of the patient must be brought into unison with that of the practitioner, and therefore, the latter must wash his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... origin, source; motive, incitement, inducement, incentive. Associated Words: aetiology, etiology, teleology, etiological, causation, causative, causality. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to light these facts, as it has also taught the real causation of the disfigurement once attributed to the mother's mind. Departures from the usual form of the body occur during the earliest days of pregnancy and arise in consequence of some irregularity in the process which molds the body-form from a simple spherical mass of cells. Why ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... worth listening to? I believe the human race will be more and more unhappy as science grows. But am I on that account likely to preach a crusade against it? Sister mine, we are what we are; we think and speak and do what causation determines. If you can still hold another belief, do so, and be thrice blessed. I would so gladly see you ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... responsibility of which began and ended with the individual transgressor; he saw it as a part of a vast network and entanglement, and traced the lines of influence converging upon it in the underworld of causation. Hence the wrong and discord which pained him called out pity, rather than indignation. The first inquiry which they awakened was addressed to his own conscience. How far am I in thought, word, custom, responsible for this? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... be endowed with the aptitude and the habit of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... essentials from the accidents of disease, and of generalization from experience could go on unaffected by any view of the nature of man and of the world. Even treatment, which must almost of necessity be based on some theory of causation, was little deflected by a view of elements and humours on which it was impossible to act directly, while therapeutics was further safeguarded from such influence by the doctrine of Nature as the healer of diseases, νουσων φυσεις ιητροι {nousôn physeis iêtroi}, the vis medicatrix naturae of the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... to reason, punishment affects them in a different manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. They distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation; they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause, frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that the will is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by circumstances, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Wise Men of the East owed their instruction to a star, which is rightly observed by Gregory the Great in favour of astrology. And Albertus Magnus makes it the most valuable science, because, says he, it teaches us to consider the causation of causes, in the causes ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... formed into an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... finds life to be as dependent for its manifestation of particular molecular arrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the fact that she did not seem to be appealing to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear—in thus picking up the threads of her past—to be consciously accounting for her present. She recognized no causation there. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... general principles, no shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... whole before we can rightly estimate a part. And looking back where some light seems to rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to what seems (but only seems) to be trivial, and is certainly obscure. Let us take the most remarkable instance of all,—the Christ, whom no scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,—who, whatever else he was, must be admitted even by unbelief ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an observed order. He admits that Kepler's three laws "were an observed order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, "it contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher category of intellectual conceptions than that which is concerned in the mere observation and record of separate and apparently unconnected facts." There is hardly a line ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... sufficient to explain the effects. Consequently, the validity of the argument now under consideration is inversely proportional to the number of possibilities there are of the aspirations in question being due to the agency of physical causes; and forasmuch as our ignorance of psychological causation is well-nigh total, the Law of Parcimony forbids us to allow any determinate degree of logical value to the present argument. In other words, we must not use the absence of knowledge as equivalent to its presence—must not argue from our ignorance ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the child the greater is the per cent. of disease due to wrong feeding. In adult life overeating and eating improperly otherwise are still the principal causes of disease. But during adult life the causation of disease is more complex than in childhood, for the senses have been more fully developed and instead of confining our physical sins to overeating we fall prey to the abuse ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for a long time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart from possible "telepathic" causation, completely water-proof, airtight, incombustible, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sufficient testimony, to disbelieve that He has sometimes so interposed. To deny that this is conceivable, is to make GOD inferior to His own decree; to pronounce it incredible that the Lawgiver should be superior to His own Laws. "The universal subordination of causation," (p. 134,) we as freely admit as the Professor himself: but then we contend that everything else must be subordinate to the First great Cause of all. Worse than unphilosophical is it to argue as the Professor presumes to do, concerning the MOST HIGH; but unphilosophical in the strictest ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Sanscrit term for that great Law known to Western thinkers as Spiritual Cause and Effect, or Causation. It relates to the complicated affinities for either good or evil that have been acquired by the soul throughout its many incarnations. These affinities manifest as characteristics enduring from one incarnation to ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... selected from authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end of lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends: life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and since a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at all: he is living still, and always will be living. And since Sir James Barrie ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... all alike in this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alike reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical causation. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... removing any possible misconception about the scope of these proceedings. They are not proceedings in which this Court can adjudicate on the causes of the disaster. The question of causation is obviously a difficult one, as shown by the fact that the Commissioner and the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in his report came to different conclusions on it. But it is not this Court's concern now. This is not an appeal. Parties to hearings by Commissions ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... "No sensation or causation in matter; but I think that is answered the same way as the other. But this last one; I do wonder if the Bible corroborates it?" Kate looked troubled again, as she read: "'There is no ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... Edwards attempts to reconcile the free-agency and accountability of man with the great argument from the law of causation, or with his doctrine of necessity, is, as we have seen, precisely the same as that adopted by Hobbes. There is not a shade of difference between them. It is, indeed, easy to demonstrate that liberty, according to this definition of it, is not inconsistent with necessity; and it is just as ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... written at college, and he was among the original contributors to the Edinburgh Review, the opening article in the second number, on "Kant's Philosophy," proceeding from his pen. An essay on Hume's "Theory of Causation," which he produced during the struggle attendant on Mr Leslie's appointment to the mathematical chair, established his hitherto growing reputation; and the public in the capital afterwards learned, with more than satisfaction, that he had consented to act as substitute for Professor Dugald ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various |
