The Philosophy of Science: A Contribution Thereto, on Cause and Effect |
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action antece antecedent APPENDIX TO CHAPTER Atkinson Baden Powell believe Berkeley billiard-ball Brown called caus causation cause and effect cause of night cerned Comte conceive consequence definition DUGALD STEWART Duke of Argyll efficient cause energy or agent Essays existence experience explanation extract fact force future will resemble Hamilton Hamilton Hume Hist Hobbes Hume Hume's doctrine Hume's Theory inference Inquiry instance intuitive invariable Kant Law of Nature Leibnitz Lewes Logic Malebranche Mansel matter mean men are mortal merely metaphysics Mill mind moral motion neces necessary connection nexus Note object observed opinion order of events perceive phenomena phenomenon Phil Philosophy premisses Professor Bain quadruped Referred Reid and Beattie Reid Beattie Reign of Law relation resemble the past rience sality sect sequence sequent simply Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON Stewart substance sugar sweet syllogism synonymous term thing thought tion true uncon uniformity universal Whewell
Popular passages
Page 169 - Parallelograms upon the same base and between the same parallels, are equal to one another.
Page 54 - For in the communication of motion by impulse, wherein as much motion is lost to one body as is got to the other, which is the ordinariest case, we can have no other conception but of the passing of motion out of one body into another ; which, I think, is as obscure and inconceivable, as how our minds move or stop our bodies by thought ; which we every moment find they do.
Page 32 - When we look about us towards external objects and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion, any quality which binds the effect to the cause and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other.
Page 172 - The laws of attraction and repulsion are to be regarded as laws of motion, and these only as rules or methods observed in the productions of natural effects, the efficient and final causes whereof are not of mechanical consideration. Certainly, if the explaining a phenomenon be to assign its proper efficient and final cause,* it should seem the mechanical philosophers never explained...
Page 170 - A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds; it implies a power; for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing, is nothing.
Page 76 - This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is tenconditianalnesi. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.
Page 66 - But when many uniform instances appear, and the same object is always followed by the same event, we then begin to entertain the notion of cause and connexion.
Page 75 - ... the antecedent which it invariably follows,' we do not use this phrase as exactly synonymous with 'the antecedent which it invariably has followed in our past experience.
Page 172 - According to this language, every well-grounded inductive generalization is either a law of nature, or a result of laws of nature, capable, if those laws are known, of being predicted from them. And the problem of Inductive Logic may be summed up in two questions: how to ascertain the laws of nature; and how, after having ascertained them, to follow them into their results.
Page 76 - But it is necessary to our using the word cause that we should believe not only that the antecedent always has been followed by the consequent, but that as long as the present constitution of things * endures it always will be so.