"Causal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sequence in which all the elements, one after another, contribute towards the bringing about of some end or result. It is the unity characteristic of all teleologically related facts. The sequence cannot be a mere succession or even a simple causal series, but must also be purposive, because, in order to be aesthetic, the goal which is reached must have value. Causality is an important aspect of this type of unity, as in the drama, but only because a teleological series ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... we consider the antecedent state and process of things very widely or very minutely, it never does exactly recur; nor does the consequent. But the purpose of induction is to get as near the truth as possible within the limits set by our faculties of observation and calculation. Complex causal instances that are most unlikely to recur as a whole, may be analysed into the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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.
... general, since its movement is the measure of all motion.[104] Then, by 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... ordinarily carried on, these natural relations between words and their meanings are habitually traced, and their laws explained; it must be admitted that they are commonly learned as fortuitous relations. On the other hand, the relations which science presents are causal relations; and, when properly taught, are understood as such. While language familiarises with non-rational relations, science familiarises with rational relations. While the one exercises memory only, the other exercises both memory ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... than it was when the discussion first began. Others, 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 ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... intellectual steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,—in Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the Stoic Zeno,—in Judea, the advent of Jesus,—and in modern Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal facts which carry forward races to new convictions, and elevate the rule of life. In the presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to insist on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or gas-light, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Thucydides has 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 ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of 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 ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... only and invariably have moral results. But the will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial personality. If, therefore, he is to retain this power of solution, and yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of man's volition remains the same, when all his impulses ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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 of a nation, its very right of existing as a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... says a great Teacher, in turn at- itself to three vestures: first, to the physical body, then to the finer body, and thirdly to the causal body. Finally it stands forth radiant, ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Enuresis, causal factors in characteristics and peculiarities of condition of urine during mental aspects of mistakes in treatment of perversion of suggestion as cause of removal of tonsils in treatment, essentials in hypnotic suggestion ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... succession, it becomes evident that there is no uniqueness in a series of casual antecedents of a given event, but that, at any point where there is a correlation of simultaneity, we can pass from one line of antecedents to another in order to obtain a new series of causal antecedents. It will be necessary to specify the causal law according to which the antecedents are to be considered. I received a letter the other day from a correspondent who had been puzzled by various philosophical questions. After enumerating them he says: "These questions led me from Bonn ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... were asked what is meant by an ethical unity, I should answer, in the first place, that it implies purpose. The unity of reality is not exhibited by a description of its present or past conditions or even by an account of its causal connexions. These modes of description are all affected by the fragmentariness which always belongs to temporal apprehension. But, when things are seen in the light of a purpose, a view of them as a whole becomes possible, and the fragmentariness ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... no more force than y in this type of phrase. Probably this use arose from the causal sense of ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... 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 is only a matter for historians. For the masses the mores are facts. They use them and they ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... it wills that the limbs be moved, the limbs not only will be moved, but cannot help being moved accordingly. But it is simply impossible that, from the exercise of volitions which it knows will be obeyed, the mind should not receive the sensation of exercising causal power; and having thus got the sensation, it has nothing to do but to copy the sensation in order to get the idea of causal power. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute; the first step being taken the others cost nothing. The mind having, by introspection of its own operations, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... well as others, made some contributions to our knowledge of microscopical life, and among other organisms studied those which we now call bacteria. Speculations were even made at these early dates of the possible causal connection of these organisms with diseases, and for a little the medical profession was interested in the suggestion. It was impossible then, however, to obtain any evidence for the truth of this speculation, and it was abandoned as unfounded, and even forgotten completely, until ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... impossible. A living, human being is necessary, upon whose presence these phenomena depend, 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
... considerable experience in nursing at the breast, discovered that the flow of milk was less abundant, he used to place his hand hard on the breast as if he wanted to force out the milk by pressure. Of course there was here no insight into the causal connection, but it is a question whether the firm laying on of the little hand was not repeated for the reason that the experience had been once made accidentally, that after doing this the ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... engagement, and avocation: "Business occupies all of a person's thoughts, as well as his time and powers; occupation and employment occupy only his time and strength; the first is most regular—it is the object of his choice; the second is causal—it depends on the will of another. Engagement is a partial employment; avocation a particular engagement; an engagement prevents us from doing anything else; an avocation calls off or prevents us from doing ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... affected by a rise of tariff rates are outside the commercial circles where short-time credit is common and where the rapid readjustment of investment leads to a financial crisis. It never has been convincingly shown, however, that there is any large measure of correspondence in time (not to say causal relation) between tariff revisions ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... the most essential characteristics of species. Even were man not one of them—a member of the same system and subject to the same laws—the question of their origin, their causal connexion, that is, with the other phaenomena of the universe, must have attracted his attention, as soon as his intelligence had raised itself above the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 try to succeed by a misrepresentation of facts. One ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... beginning is that 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 middle is that which follows ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... 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 &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... having added to their destructiveness, passed them on to the peoples of the world as represented by the League of Nations. Some of them deplored the mess in which they were leaving the nations, without, however, admitting the causal nexus between it and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst, you go on to the Starway, or Nhergal's, or some other bar. In both cases, on both time-lines, you follow the line of maximum probability; in the second case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal factor." ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... accepted as the law of human changes, past and even future. So, empirical generalisations, from present to past time, and from the character of one nation to that of another, are similarly fallacious when employed as causal laws. 4. This Fallacy occurs, not only when an empirical is confounded with a causal law, but when causation is inferred improperly. The mistake sometimes lies in inferring a posteriori that one fact must be the cause of another (e.g. the National Debt, or some special institution, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... 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
... purposive point of view. On the other hand, the man whose inner life is to me an object can satisfy my interest only if I understand every particular happening in his mind from its preceding causes. I transform his whole life into a chain of causes and effects. My standpoint is thus a causal one. No doubt in our daily life, our purposive interest and our causal interest may intertwine at any moment. I may sympathize with the hopes and fears of my neighbor in a purposive way, and may yet in the next moment consider from ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... completeness, either as a summary of the events of that period or as a discussion of the political questions involved in them. I have aimed especially at grouping facts in such a way as to bring out and emphasize their causal sequence, and it is accordingly hoped that the book may prove useful to the student ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... 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
... 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 to the more backward state of civilisation in the South, and ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... 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 ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... observation, however, could not have been made until man had migrated from the tropical regions, and had reached a stage of mechanical development enabling him to live in subtropical or temperate zones. Even then it is conceivable that a long period must have elapsed before a direct causal relation was felt to exist between the shifting of the sun and the shifting of the seasons; because, as every one knows, the periods of greatest heat in summer and greatest cold in winter usually come some weeks after the time of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... innermost souls at the critical periods of our studies, at the Dies irae, dies ilia of the severe examinations. After we have ceased to be pupils it is no longer as at first the parents and governesses or later the teachers that take care of our punishment. The inexorable causal nexus of life has taken over our further education, and now we dream of the preliminaries or finals; whenever we expect that the result will chastise us, because we have not done our duty, or done something incorrectly, or whenever we feel the pressure of responsibility. Stekel's ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... CHILDREN OF GOD—'I said ye are gods,'—that he would have them partakers of his own blessedness in kind—be as himself;—suppose his grand idea could not be contented with creatures perfect ONLY by his gift, so far as that should reach, and having no willing causal share in the perfection, that is, partaking not at all of God's individuality and free-will and choice of good; then suppose that suffering were the only way through which the individual could ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... comes into the mind with the incoming tide of experience. There was plenty of reality. We had our discomforts and our disappointments. We were forced to take into account the causal order of things. But the mind had a chance to add its part to the fact of existence. And so it always needs to be. I have been successful as a man of business in part because of my early use of the gift of imagination. It is bad ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... 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 ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... seemed to me. In the verb 'methinks' me is the dative, and thinks is an impersonal verb (A.S. thincan, to appear), quite distinct from the causal verb 'I think,' which is from A.S. thencan, to ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... himself that they were the people who had burned Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne alive; that two of the three bombs that had contributed to that column of boiling smoke had been made in Keegark, by Keegarkans, and that, with a few causal factors altered, he was seeing what would have happened to Konkrook. Perhaps every Terran felt a superstitious dread of nuclear energy turned to the purposes of war; small wonder, after what they had done on their ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... But as the days passed on and this possible retribution overtook him not, his fears gradually forsook him, and instead of speaking pitifully of "those poor little children who were whipped," he mentioned them in a causal off-hand manner as, "those cry-babies, you know?" One afternoon mamma saw him sitting on the porch, slapping his little fat hand with a strap. "Tommy, child, what in the world are you doing?" ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... Iowa. Neighboring states were quick to follow as surveys showed a wider distribution of the disease. Now almost every state in which oak wilt occurs is taking part in efforts to learn more about the disease and its causal agent so that practical control measures may be applied before the spread of the disease gets out of hand. The National Oak Wilt Research Committee at Memphis, Tennessee, supports in part an intensive oak wilt research program in coordination with several midwestern universities and with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of which 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, to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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, now of fraud, rather ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... symbol-world, as "being-in-itself," with things, we 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 will" is regarded ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... development of the dragon-myth astronomical factors played a very obtrusive part: but I have deliberately refrained from entering into a detailed discussion of them, because they were not primarily the real causal agents in the origin of the myth. When the conception of a sky-world or a heaven became drawn into the dragon story it came to play so prominent a part as to convince most writers that the myth was primarily and essentially ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... or at any rate taught, that Jupiter was himself that soul of the world (animus mundi) which fills and moves the whole material universe.[557] He is the one universal causal agent,[558] from whom all the forces of nature are derived;[559] or he may be called, in language which would be intelligible to the ordinary Roman, the universal Genius.[560] Further, he is himself all the other gods and goddesses, who ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... by the 'workings' of the idea. According to what they are, does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to light. These tendencies have still earlier conditions which, in a general way, biology, psychology and biography can trace. This whole chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things in which new relations, not simply causal, can now be found, or into which they can now be introduced,—the relations namely which we epistemologists study, relations of adaptation, of substitutability, of instrumentality, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... 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 ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... 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
... 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 ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... 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 ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... seemingly infinite variety, the endless succession, of events that pass under our observation in what we call the external world, we are led by an irresistible tendency to trace what we call a causal connexion between them. The tendency to discover the causes of things appears indeed to be innate in the constitution of our minds and indispensable to our continued existence. It is the link that arrests and colligates into convenient bundles ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... theory which is called causal, and another which is called modal, evolution. According to the former, evolution is the first cause of all life, which, of course, excludes God as the First Cause; and according to the latter, evolution is the mode, or method, used by ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... on to the conquest of the causal body in a similar way. When the conquering of the causal body is complete then you go to the conquering of the Buddhic body. When mastery over the Buddhic body is complete, you pass on to theconquest of the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... structural change, Mr. Cope adduces the hooked and toothed beaks of the falcons and the butcher-birds, and he argues that the fact of these birds belonging to widely different groups proves that similarity of use has produced a similar structural result. But no attempt is made to show any direct causal connection between the use of a bill to cut or tear flesh and the development of a tooth on the mandible. Such use might conceivably strengthen the bill or increase its size, but not cause a special tooth-like outgrowth which was not present in the ancestral thrush-like forms of the butcher-bird. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... causality'—that is a general name. And just as in mechanics, for example, there are 'minimum-principles', such as the law of least action, so too in physics there are causal laws, laws ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... 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 which ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the so-called census of hallucinations, it gave voice to its belief that between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection existed that was not due to chance. And since then the society has contented itself with steadily accumulating evidence designed to throw light on the causal connection between deaths and ghosts, and to illumine the central problem of demonstrating scientifically the existence of an unseen world and the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... connotations; but the fact is that without the exercise of this power, our 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 ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 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. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... those which are contained in, or which flow from, the definition. Now it may be questioned whether there can, in the nature of things, be such a thing as an inseparable accident. For if an attribute were found to belong invariably to all the members of a class, we should suspect that there was some causal connection between it and the attributes which constitute the definition, that is, we should suspect the attribute in question to be essential and not accidental. Nevertheless the term 'inseparable accident' may be retained as ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... 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. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... repeatedly taken after medicine, may become, by simple 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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, showing 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 this reason his presence ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... 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
... be casual, but causal. He who does most and does it well, becomes most. Horatius received as much land as he could plow around in a day. And you and I get each day just as much as, by putting our hand to the plow of activity, we are able to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... 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 the men who work to maintain the stock and those who use it get their returns together. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... 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
... the hair, 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... compare them. It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their connections—with what goes before and comes after. Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... prove that a belief in purpose as the causal reality of which Nature is an expression is not inconsistent with a full and whole-hearted acceptance of the explanations ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... or one which is invariably followed by the 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, whether ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... between the purposive and causal factors, in itself, for purposes of definition and study, need not be objected to, if it were consistently carried out, which it is not. He so nearly pre-empts the whole ground for the causal, giving scant courtesy to the purposive, merely a few crumbs of comfort, so that it cannot be said to ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... 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 ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 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, and animal, the regular order of nature—probably also the disposition of the whole ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... 'It is this causal series which moves heaven and the stars, attempers the elements to mutual accord, and again in turn transforms them into new combinations; this which renews the series of all things that are born and die through like successions of germ and birth; it is its operation which binds the destinies ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius |
