[BNP/E3, 154 - 100, 99]
1.
Alexander Search
Essay on the Idea of Cause. (extract).
Schopenhauer has divided the idea of Cause into 3 other ideas properly speaking: Causation, excitation, and motivation. The first occurs in the domain of inorganic things; it is characterized by its conformity to the first and to the second laws of Newton. The anterior modification corresponds always to the posterior modification; and action and reaction are equal. Excitation differs from causation in that there is no regular correspondence between the cause and the effect. Motivation is, according to Schopenhauer, causation acting through an intellect. Thus motivation has the character of finality. Every act has an end.
Let us examine closely these ideas and see how true they are and how far they go. In the first place it is quite true that causation in the inorganic, inanimate world is rigorously subject to law. Nay more, inanimate things are exempt, as far as we can see, from the law of differences, or, as Leibnitz calls it, the Law of indiscernibles. We are bound to admit that the same amount of heat applied at several times to the same bar of iron will produce in all cases a similar expansion. But {…}
We are quite justified in saying that if the same amount of heat could be trice[1] applied
[100v]
to the same bar of iron, it would at all times most certainly produce the same expansion. But, as far as we know, the same fact is not repeated exactly as it was, nor are there, we believe, two like things in the whole universe. The bar of iron we have used is not the bar of iron we use now, third other time. Its radio-activity is indeed infinitesimal; nevertheless it exists and an experiment cannot be the same. The bar of iron is the same and it is not the same. “Being is nothing,” said Heraclitus, “and becoming is all.”
(Certitude is mathematical and no more. There is no stability in physical things. I cannot divide a thing in half, I must make some mistake. No 2 things in the world being equal, it is clear that I cannot divide a thing correctly, that those two empirical halves cannot be equal. But mathematically all this is possible and true. It is true that 4 is the half of 8 and that one half 4 is always equal to the other half 4.)
[99r]
In the first place then we have to make this objection: what Schopenhauer calls causation has nothing at all of cause. The transmission of heat to a bar of iron which results in the apartition of the iron molecules, is no relation of cause to effect. It is nothing but a transmission of movement; nothing different from a billiard ball which hits another and stops, imparting to the other its movement. Again if at two different times I throw a stone with equal force — a pure hypothesis, of course — though in different directions, once against a tree, at another time along a clear field, it is obvious that even here there is no question of causation. However diverse the movement of the two stones, their movement, in regard to its quantity, is rigorously equal; it cannot but be so, being in both cases the product of an equal force. And a movement must perforce be the product and the continuation of another movement and this one the result of another and thus are linked all the forces and motions of the universe. The so-called causation is nothing but the change from one movement to another, or from one form of movement to another form, or a change of media in the same movement.
[99v]
Example of football field.
Consider now the form of Cause which Schopenhauer calls excitation. Here we have no longer a movement, for a movement would transmit itself equally. Yet it produces always {…}
In me and in the |man|[2] excitation has produced a different effect. It cannot then be a movement; it cannot be conceived as one. Let us consider excitation more closely than we have done. The nature of excitation is, it is said, that there is no real proportion between cause and effect (so to call them) or, better, between the anterior and the consequent modification.
[1] trice /several times\
[2] |man| /player\
