Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Causation

That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be unravelled by any industry of ours.

It becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause from the effect by which we know it.

We know the effects of many things, but the causes of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and enquiry than conjecture. But those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign, for he that would be wiser than nature would be wiser than God.

I sometimes use the word cause to signify any antecedent with which a consequent event is so connected that it truly belongs to the reason why the proposition which affirms that event is true, whether it has any positive influence or not.

Every effect doth after a sort contain, at leastwise resemble, the cause from which it proceedeth.

The wise and learned amongst the very heathens themselves have all acknowledged some first cause whereupon originally the being of all things dependeth; neither have they otherwise spoken of that cause than as an agent, which knowing what and why it worketh, observeth in working a most exact order or law.

Cause is a substance exerting its power into act, to make one thing begin to be.

The cleanness and purity of one’s mind is never better proved than in discovering its own faults at first view.

The general idea of cause is that without which another thing, called the effect, cannot be. The final cause is that for the sake of which anything is done.

Various theories of causation have been propounded. It appears, however, to be agreed that, although in every instance we actually perceive nothing more than that the event, change, or phenomenon B always follows the event, change, or phenomenon A, yet that we naturally believe in the existence of some unknown quality or circumstance belonging to the antecedent A, in virtue of which the consequent B always has been, is, and will be, produced.

Never was man whose apprehensions are sober, and by pensive inspection advised, but hath found by an irresistible necessity one everlasting being all forever causing and all forever sustaining.

To every thing we call a cause we ascribe power to produce the effect. In intelligent causes, the power may be without being exerted; so I have power to run when I sit still or walk. But in inanimate causes we conceive no power but what is exerted, and therefore measure the power of the cause by the effect which it actually produces. The power of an acid to dissolve iron is measured by what it actually dissolves.

It is necessary in such a chain of causes to ascend to and terminate in some first, which should be the original of motion, and the cause of all other things, but itself be caused by none.

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.