CAUSAL JUDGMENTS
A Causal Judgment interprets and explains sense-perceptions. For
instance, the tiny baby's first vague notion that _something_, no
knowing what, must have caused the impressions of warmth and
whiteness and roundness and smoothness that accompany the arrival
of its milk-bottle--this is a causal judgment.
[Sidenote: _Elementary Conclusions_]
The very first conclusion that you form concerning any sensation that
reaches you is that something produced it, though you may not be
very clear as to just what that something is. The conclusions of the
infant mind, for example, along this line must be decidedly vague and
indefinite, probably going no further than to determine that the cause
is either inside or outside of the body. Even then its judgment may
be far from sure.
[Sidenote: _First Effort of the Mind_]
Yet, baby or grown-up, young or old, the first effort of every human
mind upon the receipt and perception of a sensation is to find out
what produced it. The conclusion as to what did produce any particular
sensation is plainly enough a judgment, and since it is a judgment
determining the cause of the sensation, it may well be termed a causal
judgment.
Causal judgments, taken by themselves, are necessarily very
indefinite. They do not go much beyond deciding that each individual
sensation has a cause, and is not the result of chance on the one hand
nor of spontaneous brain excitement on the other. Taken by themselves,
causal judgments are disconnected and all but meaningless.
[Sidenote: _Distorted Eye Pictures_]
I look out of my window at the red-roofed stone schoolhouse across
the way, and, _so far as the eye-picture alone is concerned_, all
that I get is an impression of a flat, irregularly shaped figure, part
white and part red. The image has but two dimensions, length and
breadth, being totally lacking in depth or perspective. It is a flat,
distorted, irregular outline of two of the four sides of the building.
It is not at all like the big solid masonry structure in which a
thousand children are at work. My causal judgments trace this
eye-picture to its source, but they do not add the details of
distance, perspective, form and size, that distinguish the reality
from an architect's front elevation. These causal judgments of visual
perceptions must be associated and compared with others before a real
"idea" of the schoolhouse can come to me.
[Sidenote: _Elements that Make Up an Idea_]
Taken by themselves, then, causal judgments fall far short of giving
us that truthful account of the outside world which we feel that our
senses can be depended on to convey.
[Sidenote: _Causal Judgments and the Outer World_]
If there were no mental processes other than sense-perceptions and
causal judgments, every man's mind would be the useless repository
of a vast collection of facts, each literally true, but all without
arrangement, association or utility. Our notion of what the outside
world is like would be very different from what it is. We would have
no concrete "ideas" or conceptions, such as "house," "book," "table,"
and so on. Instead, all our "thinking" would be merely an unassorted
jumble of simple, disconnected sense-perceptions.
What, then, is the process that unifies these isolated sense-perceptions
and gives us our knowledge of things as concrete wholes?