"Causation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anthropo-geography can reach surer conclusions than regarding direct psychical effects, because it can trace their mode of operation as well as define the result. Direct psychical effects are more matters of conjecture, whose causation is asserted rather than proved. They seem to float in the air, detached from the solid ground under foot, and are therefore subject matter for the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... inclinations and acts, cases in which from curiosity alone brothers and sisters indulge together in obscene conversation and even improper practices. Unquestionably, the lack of sexual sympathy between brothers and sisters depends upon a deeply rooted psychological causation. Above all, in this connexion, we have to bear in mind the slight degree of influence each exercises on the senses of the other, precisely in consequence of the long-continued, comparatively unrestrained ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... according to the promptings of boundless love and absolute omniscience? Is prayer really a power with God, or is it merely an expedient by which our own piety may be cultivated? Is it not merely a power (that is, a stated antecedent accompanied by the idea of causation), but is it a transcendent power, accomplishing what no other power can, over-ruling all other agencies, and rendering them subservient to its own wonderful efficiency? I think there are few devout readers of the Bible ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... the name, 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
... and television have been the subject of expert appraisal in many countries. The Committee has made its recommendations in this section of the report fully aware that many authorities can describe these matters as no more than secondary influences in the causation ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially similar to that which we now know, came into existence, without any precedent condition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The assumption that successive states of Nature have arisen, each without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... into the matter it is well to note some exceptional cases of the causation of laughter. The first of these is the excitation of laughter by a purely mechanical "stimulus" or action from the exterior, without any corresponding mental emotion of joy—namely by "tickling," that is to say, by light rubbing or touching of the skin under ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... putting the queries almost at random to Lizzie Tuoey, noting carelessly, as if they held nothing of the body of his business, her replies. While the amazing fact was that, quite aside from his subsequent credulity or any reasonable skepticism, the two presented the most complete possible unity of causation and climax. As a story, beyond which I have no interest, together they are admirable. They were enveloped, too, in the consistency of mood loosely called atmosphere; that is, all the details of their surrounding combined to color the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... attributed to the pressure of some hard object on the palm of the hand—such as a hammer or shovel or whip—its greater frequency in those who do no manual work, and the fact that it is very often bilateral, indicate that the constitutional factor is the more important in its causation. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... 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 sin, sickness ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... illusions, and feel certain difficulties,—the illusion of unstimulated and unmotived freedom of action, and the difficulty of reconciling this with the felt necessity for general determinism and causation. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... when transferred to the eye works such lamentable mischief. Without their existence the inoculation of pus in the healthy eye is harmless; pus bearing the gonococci excites the most intense inflammation. Similar suppurative action in the cornea is often caused by infection of cocci. The proof of causation may be found in the fact that the most effective cure now practiced for such suppuration is to sterilize them by the actual cautery. Rosenbach says that he knows six distinct microbes which are capable of exciting suppuration in man. Their activity may be productive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... Herbert Spencer devotes several pages to the snake, and the reason for its appearance in the religion of primitive peoples. He ascribes to savages a psychical acuteness that I am by no means willing to allow them, inasmuch as he makes them give a psychical causation for their adoption of the serpent as a deity, such as no ignorant and uncultivated savage could have possibly evolved. I am inclined to believe that, like all great students and thinkers, Mr. Spencer has a hobby, and that this hobby is animism or ancestor-worship. ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the fundamental 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 the best method. England ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... says, "Causation is the will, creation is the act, of God." Creation is planned and inspired for the attainment of constantly rising results. The order is chaos, light, worlds, vegetable forms, animal life, then man. There is no reason to pause here. This is not perfection, not even perpetuity. Original ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... of Rebirth coupled with its companion law, the law of Causation does that. When we die after one life, we return to earth later, under circumstances determined by the manner in which we lived before. The gambler is drawn to pool parlors and race tracks to associate with others of like taste, the musician is attracted to the concert halls ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... savage draws his ideas of natural causation from observation of himself. Hence he explains the phenomena of nature by supposing that they are produced by beings like himself. These beings may be called spirits or gods of nature to distinguish them from living ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... are due to such a simple mechanical causation as the production by the sun, of a rarefied atmosphere, the colder air rushing in from all sides into the empty spaces, we should hardly expect to find any definite currents bounded by well-defined limits; ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... and causation gives power to, and justifies the modern trend of, library work with children as the most important and far-reaching of all its great work. Of thirty million men and women, and their children, who have come ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... of the first verses of this narrative is full of meaning. 'Then' marks the immediate connection, not only in time but in causation, between the baptism and the temptation. The latter followed necessarily on the former. 'Of the Spirit'—then God does lead His Son into temptation. For us all, as for Christ, it is true that, though God does not tempt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... from discursive reasoning, its origin in mental imagery, its speculative outlook, its value for practical life and social well-being, its relation to scientific knowledge, and its bearings on the problems of natural and rational causation. London, 1913. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... by 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
... Our study of causation in this case, as we intimated at first, is necessarily incomplete. But some things, probably explanatory, stand out very clearly. Heredity is moderately defective. Inez was the outcome of an unfortunate pregnancy and was a ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... names, places, dates, motives, the chain of causation, what you said, what you did, what you felt, what you thought, the reasons why you felt, thought, acted as you did, the reasons why your thought and action had not been such-and-such, your opinion of your own conduct, in looking back upon the episode, ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found in the creature's conforming his will to that of his Maker; this is the trait of the angels who were steadfast in their faith. How can you here couple fatality and will? If ours be a state of probation, it is only by a certain freedom of action, an originating power of causation in ourselves, that we can conceive of our being put to proof. Possibly, in fallen man, that freedom is limited to the power of rejecting or yielding to the influences of grace. Yet within that narrow ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... 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 another, being added to here, softened or altered there, but always pressing forward ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... commonest of sexual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor Freud, with his bold and original views on the sexual causation of many abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-analytic method of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no means universally accepted, is yet exerting a revolutionary influence all over the world. During the last ten years, indeed, the amount ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... that the beliefs of memory precede the use of language, and therefore are originally purely instinctive, and independent of any rational justification, should have been of great importance to Hume, from its bearing upon his theory of causation; and it is curious that he has not adverted to it, but always takes the trustworthiness of memories for granted. It may be worth while briefly to ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... that in The Absolute, or First Cause, there could be no sin and consequently no sorrow, and he persistently sought to inaugurate such systems of conduct and such a standard of morals as would lead the disciple back to godhood, or liberation from the "wheel of causation." ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... to banish it altogether from the scientific vocabulary, and to substitute for the terms {29} cause and effect, antecedent and consequent, reducing causation to conjunction. But it was generally admitted that, where we have to deal with an invariable antecedent followed by an invariable consequent, nothing was to be gained by a change in the common phraseology. ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... one can doubt but causation has the same influence as the other two relations of resemblance and contiguity. Superstitious people are fond of the reliques of saints and holy men, for the same reason, that they seek after types or images, in order ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... subtle forces, (4) the solar fire as the cause of all other forms of heat, (5) heat as the cause of molecular change, (6) the law of gravitation as caused by the quality that inheres in earth-atoms to give them their attractive power or downward pull, (7) the kinetic nature of all energy; causation as always rooted in an expenditure of energy or a redistribution of motion, (8) universal dissolution through the disintegration of atoms, (9) the radiation of heat and light rays, infinitely small particles, darting forth in all directions with inconceivable speed (the modern 'cosmic ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... help a fellow-worker in science or philanthropy if it were possible for him to do so. Thus, indeed, began the friendship between us. For when plague first invaded India in 1896, the writer was one of those sent to Bombay to work at the problem of its causation from the scientific side, thereby becoming interested in the life history of rats, which were shown to be intimately connected with the spread of this dire disease. Having for years admired Eha's ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... duty is; and it is only because man's nature cannot be accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is open for an idealist ethics such as Green's. But perhaps Green laid too much stress on the problem of historical causation. What matters it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can know ourselves and the world? If we can now distinguish right and wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... I taught that as often as certain forms of animals and plants disappeared, for reasons quite intelligible to us, others took their place by virtue of a causation which was beyond our comprehension; it remained for Darwin to accumulate proof that there is no break between the incoming and the outgoing species, that they are the work of evolution, and not ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... necessity is implied {93} in every true idea of freedom. If a man were the subject of necessity alone he would be merely the creature of mechanical causation. If he had the power of spontaneity only his so-called freedom would be a thing of caprice. Necessity means simply that man is conditioned by the world in which he lives. Spontaneity means, not that he can conjure up at a wish a ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... seems like going a long way off from and around to the end in view. But there are no isolated facts and forces in the world and all things work together. When we see providence start in we never can tell where it is going to come out. If God is about to bless us, he may start the chain of causation that shall at length reach us in some far-off place or land; or if he is about to save a soul in China he may start with one of us in the contribution we make to foreign missions. Caesar Augustus, master of the world, from time to time ordered a census ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... 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 ...
— 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
... 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
... two chapters have been added with a view to affording some information, first, as to the conditions under which a great part of the surgical work was done, and, secondly, as to the mechanism and causation of the injuries, which would not readily be at hand in the case of the general surgical reader. For much of the information contained in Chapter II. I must express my indebtedness to the work of MM. Nimier and ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... covers the greater part of Greenland, extended down to the line of the Ohio River at Cincinnati. Although these changes of climate are, as we shall hereafter note, probably due to entangled causes, we must look upon the modifications of the ocean streams as one of the most important elements in the causation. We can the more readily imagine such changes to be due to the alterations in the course and volume of the ocean current when we note how trifling peculiarities in the geography of the shores—features which are likely to be altered by the endless ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient deceptions ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... without its expression? 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 hollowness, the more we shall ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and making his last speech—every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He turned to fiction—and found it had no grip on him. He read the "Island Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense of causation" was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling, and found he "proved nothing," besides being irreverent and vulgar. These scientific people have their limitations. Then unhappily, he tried Besant's "Inner House," and the opening chapter set his mind upon ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... manners, and poetry: and, look you,—on the whole, selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the best citizen." Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French celerity,—a ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... possible that the dangers may be avoided and the requisites secured by a change in electoral machinery? Those who have no conception of the working of social forces, and who do not trace the law of causation into the realm of mind, will be inclined to scoff at the suggestion. To them the only hope of improvement lies in appealing to the people to elect better men. They ignore entirely the reciprocal relation ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... community is to become a conflict of inter-woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on falling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking—persistent, destructive ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... of a variety requires and presupposes Divine power. And so between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical conception of the other no contrariety remains. "A proper view of the nature of causation.... places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[9] A true and worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... history. No accident can disturb or thwart it; for, in truth, there can be no such thing as accident, except in our imaginations, and by reason of our incapacity to trace the continuous thread of inevitable sequence, or causation, which connects together all events whatever, in their inception, through their continuance, and to their end. All enlightened thinkers of the present age have recognized this great truth; and yet none have been able to apply to social and political affairs the sole admitted test of genuine philosophy, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... able to make her. The poet says nothing as to the making of the "nos." Perhaps some men are independent of antecedents and surroundings and have an initial force within themselves which is in no way due to causation; but this is supposed to be a difficult question and it may be as well to avoid it. Let it suffice that George Pontifex did not consider himself fortunate, and he who does not ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... and Ricardo, but raised it at least one story higher. His inestimable "System of Logic" was a revolution. It hardly needs, of course, to be said that he owed much to his predecessors,—that he borrowed from Whewell much of his classification, from Brown the chief lines of his theory of causation, from Sir John Herschel the main principles of the inductive methods. Those who think this a disparagement of his work must have very little conception of the mass of original thought that still remains to Mr. Mill's credit, the great critical power that could gather valuable ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... as a whole has not measured up to its possibilities, to its promise; one reason why we see everywhere splendid ability doing the work of mediocrity; is because people do not think half enough of themselves. We do not realize our divinity; that we are a part of the great causation principle of the universe. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead. There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood, though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... 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, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... disappointment in love, a tragedy, or the illness of a loved one, the symptoms are alike and closely resemble the phenomena of one of the great primitive emotions. How could disappointment in love play a role in the causation of Graves' disease? If the hypothesis which has been presented as an explanation of the genesis and the phenomena of fear be correct, then that hypothesis explains also the emotion of love. If fear be a phylogenetic physical ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly remarkable that a modern ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Neo-Lamarckianism, remains to be considered. Lamarck assumed that the external conditions directly affected the organisms in [448] such a way as to make them better adapted to life, under prevailing circumstances. Nageli gave to this conception the name "Theory of direct causation" (Theorie der directen Bewirkung), and it has received the approval of Von Wettstein, Strasburger and other German investigators. According to this conception a plant, when migrating from lowlands into the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... modifications which shall make them essentially different from what they were in the 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 ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... v. tr., to help; dau fafi, to help, to surround; 2. prep, concerning, causation; ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spiritually awakened to a knowledge of the higher purposes of life, he perceives the true effect of environmental conditions, with their good and evil tendencies. He also perceives the cause and the cure. Armed with the talisman of this knowledge, he boldly enters the field of causation and thenceforward becomes a self-directing factor in his own evolution. At this important stage, he clearly comprehends, that the injury of one is the concern of all; that the perfection of all becomes ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... are seeking, therefore, is to discover how to arrange things in such an order as to set in motion a train of causation that will harmonize our own conditions without antagonizing the exercise of a like power by others. This therefore means that all individual exercise of this power is the particular application of a ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... of ours first turned in space. We then behold the most attenuate form of matter of which we can conceive, as a condensation of creative energy, yet but a matrix fitted for the reception of a planet seed or soul. We recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being, from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass, herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... suppose, owing to the survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of thought was more dignified if you could connect it with ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... subjective consciousness makes it a reality for him. What is needed, therefore, is to establish the conception that external acts are NOT the only causative power, but that there is another law of causation, namely, that of pure Thought. This is the Law of Faith, the Law of Liberty; for it introduces us to a power which is able to inaugurate a new sequence of causation not related to any ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... 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, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... alternately compresses and rarefies the air between it and the cheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of wind means a momentary increase in velocity and density of which I cannot myself in the least explain,—and find in no book on dynamics explained,—the mechanical causation. ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... 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.), and of that Origin not one of us ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... oldest theory concerning the causation of disease is that which attributes all the ills of mankind to the malignant operations of evil spirits, a theory which someone has rather fancifully suggested is not so erroneous after all, if we may be allowed to apply the term "evil spirits" to the microbes of modern bacteriology. Remnants ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... upon my head—which was the immediate causation of your correspondence about the co-extension Imperialis Academia Caesariana Naturae Curiosum (don't I know their thundering long title well!)—I have to say that I was born on the 4th of May of the year 1825, whereby I have now more or less mis-spent ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... resistance and evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding. Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... finds life to be as dependent for its manifestation on 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... perception failed of reality in one or both of these respects, without its being in any way deducible that they are not parts of the external world with which physics deals. Similar remarks will apply to the word "independent." Most of the associations of this word are bound up with ideas as to causation which it is not now possible to maintain. A is independent of B when B is not an indispensable part of the cause of A. But when it is recognised that causation is nothing more than correlation, and that there are correlations of simultaneity as well as of succession, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... the bed taking off his boots. Struck by a happy thought he transferred the constable to San Francisco, and without any more interference with normal causation went soberly to bed. In the night he dreamt of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... 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 happy, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... king's death as told in Chronicles tally with 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, ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... and this is answered by saying that we know nothing in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law can only prevent miracles by compelling and making necessary the succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and consequents, but ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... important share in the development of their ideas and life must be considered farther on, referred in a discourse of about forty years ago to three distinct stages in Unitarian theology. First, he pointed to the significance of the struggle for the principle of 'Unity in the Divine causation,' as against a doctrine which, as Unitarians maintain, endeavours in vain by words to prevent a triplicity of 'Persons' from sliding into a group of three Divine Beings. This struggle marks in great part the whole track by which the reader ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... arises from ignorance or ingratitude. We ought to know, if we do not, and we ought also to acknowledge, that our perfect day grew out of primeval darkness, and that the progress was a lingering dawn. This we hold to be the clearest view of the Divine causation. Our modern method in philosophy, largely owing to the Novum Organum of Bacon, is evolution, the novum organum of the nineteenth century; and this process recognises no abrupt or interruptive creations, but gradual transformations from pre-existent ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... publication of the Logic. This, too, was a work designed for the use of students; it was based on J. S. Mill, but differed from him in many particulars, and had as distinctive features the treatment of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in connexion with causation and the detailed application of the principles of logic to the various sciences. His services to education in Scotland were now recognized by the conferment of the honorary degree of doctor of laws by the university of Edinburgh in 1871. Next came two publications in "The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... current; but the set was always in one direction. The peculiar circumstances of each case must always be taken into account, but it is also necessary to understand that it was but one link in the chain of causation. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... disease characterized by a true hypertrophy (an overgrowth involving both bony and soft parts) of the terminal parts of the body, especially of the face and extremities (Gr. akron, point, and megas, large). It is more frequent in the female sex, between the ages of 25 and 40. Its causation is generally associated with disturbances in the pituitary gland, and an extract of this body has been tried in the treatment, as one of the recent developments in organotherapeutics; thyroid extract has also been used, but without marked success, On the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... conjunctive; contingency &c (event) 151. predicament; emergence, emergency; exigency, crisis, pinch, pass, push; occurrence; turning point. bearings, how the land lies. surroundings, context, environment 232; location 184. contingency, dependence (uncertainty) 475; causation 153, attribution 155. Adj. circumstantial; given, conditional, provisional; critical; modal; contingent, incidental; adventitious &c (extrinsic) 6; limitative^. Adv. in the circumstances, under the circumstances &c n., the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 couldn't ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... bacillus of tubercle, it is evident that there can be no distinctive diathesis. It is more than probable, moreover, that the cutaneous disease so long described as lupus vulgaris is simply a tubercular ulcer of the skin, and not a special disease of unknown causation. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... step by step; until, to be "respectable," those having relatively small means feel obliged to spend more on houses, furniture, dress, and food; and are obliged to work the harder to get the requisite larger income. This process of causation is manifest enough among ourselves; and it is still more manifest in America, where the extravagance in style of living ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... true. It is true, nothing but the truth, but it is less than the whole truth. Truly all that is significant in human history may be traced back to ideas, but in like manner the ideas themselves can be traced back to material sources. For ideas have histories, too, and the causation of an idea must be understood before the idea itself can serve fully to explain anything. We must go back of the idea to the causes which gave it birth if we would interpret anything by it. We may trace the American Revolution, for example, back to the revolutionary ideas of the ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... to abolish the whole world of matter. We are thus left with nothing but 'ideas,' and the ideas are naturally 'subjective' and therefore in some sense unreal. Finally Hume gets rid of the soul as well as the outside world; and then, by his theory of 'causation,' shows that the ideas themselves are independent atoms, cohering but not rationally connected, and capable of being arbitrarily joined or separated in any way whatever. Thus the ideas have ousted the facts. We cannot get beyond ideas, and yet ideas are still purely subjective. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... mystical in the kind of sympathy that exists between Cyril and myself. It's all purely physical. We're very like one another. But that's all. There's none of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation." ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... are, in the last analysis, just as much products of material causes as are boots or sausages. There are some intellectual Socialists whose mode of life has shielded them from the discipline of the Machine Process—the inexorable inculcator of causation—who attempt to place religion and ethics and other ideological phenomena in a separate category not to be accounted for by the materialistic conception of history. These may turn to Marx and weary their auditors by ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... extract from a circular in relation to the causation and prevention of malaria and the life history and extermination of mosquitoes issued by the Department of Health, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... this doctrine may much help the Theory of colours, and particularly the force both of Sulphureous and volatile, is likewise of Alcalizate and Acid Salts, and in what particulars, Colours likely depend not in the causation from any Salt at all, may beg his information from M. Boyle who hath some while since honoured me with the sight of his papers concerning this subject, containing many excellent experiments, made ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... inexplicable content. Then came the 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
... incompatible likewise with moral responsibility. If men are compelled by the force of circumstances, or by any force, to move only in one direction, they cannot be responsible for not moving in a different direction. Nor is it more to the purpose to undertake a subtle analysis of the nature of causation, and to explain that it does not, properly speaking, involve compulsion, but simply means invariable antecedence. Let it be that a cannon-ball does not really knock down the wall against which it strikes, and that it would be more correct to say that the ball impinges and the wall falls; ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... may have been concerned in working out the observed results. We do not know the natural causes of many diseases; but yet no one nowadays thinks of reverting to any hypothesis of a supernatural cause, in order to explain the occurrence of any disease the natural causation of which is obscure. The science of medicine being in so many cases able to explain the occurrence of disease by its hypothesis of natural causes, medical men now feel that they are entitled to assume, on the basis of a wide analogy, and therefore ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... sense of the word a miracle. Therefore, if we are to take our stand upon science—and this is what materialism professes to do—we are logically bound to conclude, not merely that the evidence of causation from body to mind is not so cogent as that of causation in any other case, but that in this particular case causation may be proved, again in the strictest sense of the term, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... asks if there is really any such thing as chance. Philosophy answers, in conformity with Aristotle's definition (Phys., II. iv.), that chance is merely relative to human purpose, and that what seems fortuitous really depends on a more subtle form of causation.—CH. II. Has man, then, any freedom, if the reign of law is thus absolute? Freedom of choice, replies Philosophy, is a necessary attribute of reason. Man has a measure of freedom, though a less perfect freedom than divine ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation, Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these well-matched antagonists, the man of wealth and station utilizing all the advantages granted him by the state of society to crush his enemy. Godwin, then, was justified in declaring that his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the fall of arterial pressure, the depression of the fontanelle, and the turgescence of the vessels of the limbs as phenomena concomitant with bodily rest and warmth, and we have no more right to assign the causation of sleep to cerebral anaemia than to any other alteration in the functions of the body, such as occur ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... chemical constitution of orchil and litmus, as given by Kane, Gelis, Pereira, and others, he discussed the subject of decolorisation of weak infusions of orchil and litmus by exclusion of atmospheric air, and by various deoxidising agents, and the different theories as to the causation of this phenomenon. "I have repeatedly had occasion to notice that, when weak infusions of these substances are excluded for some time from atmospheric air, in a bottle, with a tightly fitting cork, they gradually lose color, but rapidly regain it on re-exposure. It is curious that both orchil ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... weakness overlooked and the stomach or the intestines treated, or treatment aimed at neuralgias, rheumatisms or rheumatic conditions, that a careful examination of the patient, and a consideration of the part the heart is playing in the causation of these symptoms ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D. |
