The law of the conservation of matter and energy is nothing but an
application of the principle of identity to nature as a whole. And the
law of cause and effect is again a corollary only of the law of the
conservation of matter and energy. The law of causation is a formula
which maintains that there is identity in difference. Some motion
produces a change of form. There is accordingly a different state after
the motion than before. Yet the total amount of matter and energy
remains the same. This is the identity in the change. David Hume and
with him John Stuart Mill and the empiricists misunderstood the problem
of causation. Instead of considering cause and effect as one continuous
process that should be analysed, they considered cause and effect
separately and attempted a synthesis. In addition to this mistake, causes
as well as effects were defined to be objects. Hume says cause and
effect are objects following one another. Cause however is a process;
it is a motion, a change that takes place, an event that happens; it
is not a thing. And effect is the product of such a process. Effect is
a special form, a special state of things, a special configuration,
but not the material of which this configuration consists. A certain
poison introduced into the stomach of a living being produces certain
motions in the bowels, called cramps, which may finally prove fatal.
One change produces other changes and their product is a new state of
things which is accompanied with pain and ends in death. It is wrong to
call strychnine the cause and a dead mouse the effect. But if we call
strychnine the cause and a dead mouse the effect, we must forever despair
of solving the problem of causation by a reduction to the principle of
identity, for strychnine is not at all identical with a dead mouse. No
cause is the same thing as its effect, and we can by no means identify
cause and effect. And yet the principle of identity holds good. The
identity in causation is the conservation of matter and energy in a
change of form.
It has been maintained that the law of cause and effect could never be
proved; it is either an innate idea prior to experience (Schopenhauer and
Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant) or it is an assumption derived
from experience of which (since experience is not as yet exhausted)
we cannot know whether it will hold good forever (J. S. Mill). In
contradistinction to these views we maintain, that the law of cause and
effect can satisfactorily be proved to anyone who accepts the principle
of identity. So far as the principle of identity is recognised, all
the formal laws are unequivocally determined, or popularly expressed
they are as they are, they will remain so and cannot be otherwise, they
are necessary. All the determining factors and also the procedure of
an operation are set forth, no unforeseen events are possible, for the
non-formal elements are excluded, and therefore the result will be in one
case just as it is in any other. Thus it can _a priori_ be stated that
formal laws will always hold good.
The question has been raised: Whether or not our knowledge of the
apriority of formal laws is independent of experience. We answer: In
a certain sense it is dependent upon experience, in another it is
not. Historically and evolutionarily it is dependent upon experience.
A store of innumerable experiences has to be gained before a rational
creature will be able to make the abstraction of pure forms. As soon as
this stage is attained, man possesses a world in himself. He can now
experiment within himself with mental images, for instance with numbers:
he can calculate. His mental operations with pure form are called “pure
thought” and “pure thought” is now opposed to “experience through the
senses.” The word “experience” accordingly is used in two ways; it has a
broad and a narrow meaning. In its broad sense it means any acquisition
of knowledge generally, in its narrow sense it means knowledge acquired
through the sense-activity alone. Our knowledge of the apriority of
formal laws rests upon experience in its broad sense, but not upon
experience in its narrow sense. We can never derive the idea of necessity
from sense-impressions. John Stuart Mill in rejecting innate ideas saw
no other way than to derive the formal laws from experience (taking
here experience in the broad sense). Yet he did not make a distinction
between formal thought and sense-experience. He considered the nature of
sense-experience as typical for all experience. And thus, again, taking
experience in the narrow sense of the term, he was from his premises
perfectly justified in rejecting the idea of necessity. If the process
of cause and effect is really a synthesis of two things represented in
two different sense-impressions following each other, then indeed we have
no guarantee that the same sequences will always be observed; and there
may be worlds in which the law of causality does not operate. Mill saw
all the consequences of his mistake, he conceded freely that we are not
justified in assuming that twice two will always be four: many thousands
of experiences are in its favor, but we cannot be at all sure that no
case will ever happen in which twice two makes five.
The ideas of causality and of the conservation of matter and energy are
not derived from experience in the narrow sense of the word, not from
sense-experience, but from experience in the wider sense of the word, i.
e. from sense-experience arranged with the assistance of formal laws. We
should not forget that mere sense-experience exists only in our abstract
thought. In reality all sense-experience is relational, it is inseparable
from its form. Form and the laws of form are not something purely mental
which is transferred to the world of reality, form is something real, it
is objective, it is a quality of the facts and the thought-forms of mind
are a part and a product of the formal structure of the universe.
The ideas of causation and of the conservation of matter and energy are
not prior to experience, they are a part of experience, i. e. experience
in the wider sense. They are not part of the sense-experience, but the
results of our experiments with purely formal thought-operations, and
being the vital instrument or organ of cognition they are the condition
of all methodical experience.