"Causal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... causal connection between political revolutions and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the psychological influences on a people's character exercised by the various extremes of climate—in both cases the first appearance of a most valuable form ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the causal connexion, I hold to be equally essential to Tragedy and every serious drama, because all the mental powers act and react upon each other, and if the Understanding be compelled to take a leap, Imagination and Feeling do not follow the composition with equal alacrity. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... took the true way, your destiny would be accomplished, in a purer and more natural order. You would not learn through facts of thought or action, but express through them the certainties of wisdom. In quietness yield thy soul to the causal soul. Do not disturb thy apprenticeship by premature effort; neither check the tide of instruction by methods of thy own. Be still; seek not, but wait in obedience. Thy commission ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 'It is this causal series which moves heaven and the stars, attempers the elements to mutual accord, and again in turn transforms them into new combinations; this which renews the series of all things that are born and die through like successions of ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... this can never be a logical necessity. It must then, argues Stewart, be either a 'prejudice' or an 'intuitive judgment.' Since it is shown by 'universal consent' not to be a prejudice, it must be an intuitive judgment. Thus Hume's facts are accepted; but his inference denied. The actual causal nexus is inscrutable. The conviction that there must be a connection between events attributed by Hume to 'custom' is attributed by Stewart to intuitive belief. Stewart infers that Hume's doctrine is really favourable ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the stillest hour of the night? The hour before dawn. It is at that time, too, that in our winter nights the mercury dips down to its lowest level. Perhaps the two things have a causal relation—whatever there is of wild life in nature, withdraws more deeply within itself; it curls up and dreams. On calm summer mornings you hear no sound except the chirping and twittering of the sleeping birds. ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... physical state which occasioned it, and upon which the somatic school of German alienists had long before laid so much stress. The movement has been useful, if for no other reason than that it has concentrated attention afresh and more definitely upon the conditions which may stand in causal relation with the mental disorder, nor has it been without its influence in affecting the terms generally employed in the nomenclature of insanity. At the same time it is very striking to observe how the great types of mental disorder adopted and in part introduced ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... of God approaches him through the attribute of creative omnipotence. The common principle of causal explanation refers the origin of natural events to similar antecedent events. But there must be some first cause from which the whole series is derived, a cause which is ultimate, sufficient to itself, and the responsible author of the world. Because God's ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... or a free and uninfluenced force called a soul, or a 'desire for financial independence,' psychology has established a human being possessed of more instincts than any animal, and with a psychical nature whose activities fall completely within the causal law. ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said when our point of view is restricted to the means (i.e., the wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the end (i.e., the causal result in an ever improving world ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... effects, since the idiosyncrasy of the mother is no doubt an important factor; but where the combined coincidences are so numerous as in this case—place, time, person and exact correspondence of resulting deformity—some causal relation must ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... extent of his providence and power and their connection with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not,—are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these essential features, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... resulting from tickling, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of the statement that Simon de Montfort, during the persecution of the Albigenses, put some of them to death by tickling the soles of their feet with a feather. An additional causal factor in the production of tickling may lie in the nature and structure of the nervous process involved in perception in general. According to certain histological researches of recent years we know that between the sense-organs and the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Again, "causal energy is essentially a self-separation, for in order that a cause A. may produce an effect in B. outside of it, cause A. must detach or separate from itself the influence or energy which modifies B." ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... of brotherly love and natural equality. Indeed, Mr Norris the father gradually expanding into an oration on this swelling theme, was becoming tedious, when Mr Bevan diverted his thoughts by happening to make some causal inquiry relative to the occupier of the next house; in reply to which, this same Mr Norris the father observed, that 'that person entertained religious opinions of which he couldn't approve; and therefore he hadn't the honour of knowing the gentleman.' Mrs Norris the mother added another reason ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... may become, by simple association of sensations, so nauseous that it cannot be tolerated in after-life, illustrates clearly the way in which repugnances may be established by habitual association of feelings, without any belief in causal connexion; or rather, in spite of the knowledge that there is no causal connexion. Similarly with pleasurable emotions. The cawing of rooks is not in itself an agreeable sound: musically considered, it is very much the contrary. Yet the cawing ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... physician hailed as an incarnation of deity. In modern asylums we find one of the commonest of delusions to be that of the insane person who imagines himself to be a specially selected instrument of deity. In such instances the causal influence of pathological conditions is admitted. On the other hand, we have belonging to the more normal type the person who claims a supernatural origin for many of his actions and states of mind. And between these two extremes lie a whole series of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... ophthalmy. Although the eye affection was not as general as the typhus—it occurred only in some of the divisions, and then at the outset not so severely as later on—both evils were evidently related to each other by a common causal nexus. They appeared simultaneously under similar circumstances, but never attacked simultaneously the same individual. Whoever had ophthalmy was immune against typhus and vice versa, and this immunity furnished by one against the other evil lasted a long ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... consciousness, no less than that of all its other states, is to be sought in bodily changes, the seat of which can only be placed in the brain. And, as Locke had already done with less effect, he states and refutes the arguments commonly brought against the possibility of a causal connexion between the modes of motion of the cerebral substance and states of consciousness, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... found the indicative in causal clauses introduced by quod. The subjunctive indicates that the reason is quoted; the Hesperides said ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... is His glory, for on that Cross Jesus Christ manifests, in transcendent and superlative form, at once power and love that are boundless and divine. The Cross is the foundation of His kingdom. In his great passage in Philippians the Apostle brings together, in the closest causal connection, His obedience unto death, the death of the Cross, and His exaltation and reception of 'the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.' The title over ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... as ordinarily carried on, these natural relations between words and their meanings are habitually traced, and their laws explained; it must be admitted that they are commonly learned as fortuitous relations. On the other hand, the relations which science presents are causal relations; and, when properly taught, are understood as such. While language familiarises with non-rational relations, science familiarises with rational relations. While the one exercises memory only, the other exercises both memory ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... can, in addition, make use of his astral body at will, and obtain on the astral plane, first by reason and intuition, afterwards by personal experience, proof of another vehicle of consciousness—the mental body. At a further stage he obtains the certainty of possession of the causal body, then of higher bodies, and from that time he can no longer doubt the teachings of the Elder Brothers, those who have entered the higher evolution, the worlds that are divine. He knows, beyond all possibility of doubt, that what the ordinary man expresses in such childish ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... he is about. In reflective activity he does know, and the more thorough the reflective process, the more thorough and precise is his knowledge. He performs actions because they will achieve certain results, and he is conscious of that causal connection, both before the action is performed when he perceives the results imaginatively, and after it is performed when he ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... mind, as in that of most metaphysicians, with the very different proposition that virtue consists in recognising the Divine origin of those forces. It is characteristic, in fact, of his metaphysical school, to identify the logical with the causal connection, and to assume that the definition of a thing necessarily constitutes its essence. 'Virtue,' says Edwards, 'is the union of heart to being in general, or to God, the Being of beings' (ii. 421), and thus consists in the intellectual apprehension of Deity, and in the emotion ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Eoque mixti. Eo, causal particlefor that reason. Caesar adopted this arrangement in the battle of Pharsalia. B.C. 3, 84. The Greeks also had [Greek: pezoi amippoi]. Xen. ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... ourselves for the imperfection of nature. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its extension universal. We confuse the causal connexion of those things in nature which we call good or evil by an adventitious denomination with the logical opposition between good and evil themselves; because one generation makes room for another, we say death is necessary to life; and because the ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... is not agreed. That they have any absolute existence even is far from certain. They are relative to man in his many limitations, and represent for him the constant expression of what he may always expect to find in the world around him. But that they have any causal connection with the things around him is not to be conceived. The Natural Laws originate nothing, sustain nothing; they are merely responsible for uniformity in sustaining what has been originated and what is being sustained. They ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... uniqueness in a series of casual antecedents of a given event, but that, at any point where there is a correlation of simultaneity, we can pass from one line of antecedents to another in order to obtain a new series of causal antecedents. It will be necessary to specify the causal law according to which the antecedents are to be considered. I received a letter the other day from a correspondent who had been puzzled by various ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Ruler; and is not founded on unity of substance of the pervading principle and the world pervaded. The phrase 'consists of' (-maya) does not refer to an effect (so that the question asked would be as to the causal substance of which this world is an effect), for a separate question on this point would be needless. Nor does the—maya express, as it sometimes does-e.g. in the case of prana-maya [FOOTNOTE 92:1], ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... thunder which shakes the solid earth, and the lightning which flashes from the one side of heaven to the other. Such were the phenomena on which his intellect worked, and in which he discovered all manner of useful or harmful causal relations. Such were the phenomena which produced in him emotions of awe and terror, joy and delight. To all of them he ascribed mental life like unto his own. Indeed it was only by such a view that he could at all understand them, or bring himself ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... disease, because, although unknown in the Arctic Circle, it appeared in temperate climates during the coldest months of the year. As I was able to prove in 1915, [8] it is a disease of civilisation. I found that the causal organism was killed in thirty minutes by a temperature of 62 deg. F. It was thus obvious that infection could never be carried by cold air. But in overcrowded rooms where windows are closed, and the temperature of warm, impure, ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... open the door to, superinduce, evoke, entail, operate; elicit, provoke. conduce to &c. (tend to) 176; contribute; have a hand in the pie, have a finger in the pie; determine, decide, turn the scale; have a common origin; derive its origin &c. (effect) 154. Adj. caused &c. v; causal, original; primary, primitive, primordial; aboriginal; protogenal[obs3]; radical; embryonic, embryotic[obs3]; in embryo, in ovo[Lat]; seminal, germinal; at the bottom of; connate, having a common origin. Adv. because &c. 155; behind the scenes. Phr. causa latet vis est notissima ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... moral results. But the will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial personality. If therefore he is to retain this power of solution, and yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... forth, with what frankness and sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of which I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the school and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business and politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... feel this necessity. Those who refuse to admit the possibility of "action at a distance," who insist on inventing a connecting material medium between every observed effect and some material object with which it seems to be in causal connection, will, I suppose, have to be allowed to exercise their ingenuity in any way to satisfy their minds, even though they may have to revise their theory with every fresh discovery in optics ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... TWOFOLD CAUSALITY OF ACTUAL GRACE.—If grace is a supernatural help, mere nature cannot, of its own strength, perform salutary acts. Consequently, actual grace exercises a causal influence without which man would be helpless in the matter ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... though man has the choice between pursuing his end voluntarily (which is virtue) or kicking against the pricks (which is vice), the sum total of his accomplishments is not altered by his choice: ducunt volentern fata, nolentem trahunt. On the other hand, Vergil's master, while he affirms the causal nexus for the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... sane, representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal nexus, a relation of cause and effect between the hallucination and the coincident crisis. That connection would be provisionally explained by some not understood action of the mind or brain of the person in the crisis, on that of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... he could not guess. He had to remind himself that they were the people who had burned Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne alive; that two of the three bombs that had contributed to that column of boiling smoke had been made in Keegark, by Keegarkans, and that, with a few causal factors altered, he was seeing what would have happened to Konkrook. Perhaps every Terran felt a superstitious dread of nuclear energy turned to the purposes of war; small wonder, after what they had done ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... "moral ideas" into politics serves the most immoral purposes and plays into the hands of the most immoral men. All ethics grow out of the mores and are a part of them. That is why the ethics never can be antecedent to the mores, and cannot be in a causal or productive relation to them. "The German people distinguishes only between customs and abuses [Sitten und Unsitten] without regard to their origin." They are quite right to do so, because the origin is only a matter for historians. For the masses the mores are facts. They ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... perceives all this himself. That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... As already stated, the opinion of Hugh of St. Victor on this question is not to be followed. Nevertheless the saying that "Baptism is water" may be verified in so far as water is the material principle of Baptism: and thus there would be "causal predication." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... philosophical and religious societies may be formed. Whether it is a good or a bad thing I cannot undertake to decide; I will only say that the religious movement of which you write is one thing, and the whole trend of modern culture is another, and one cannot place the second in any causal connection with the first. Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may if only in the remote future come to know the truth of the real God—that ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection. The same thing has happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of action that they have been always held ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... and if I supposed that you would all care to go with me into matters of some abstruseness, I could certainly prove that whatever the connexion between body and mind may be, we have the best possible reasons for concluding that it is not a causal connexion. These reasons are, of course, extra-physiological; but they are not on this account less conclusive. Within the limits of a lecture, however, I can only undertake to give an outline sketch of what I take to be the overwhelming argument ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... of scientific research had not as yet been distinctly formulated, it was in previous generations the usual habit of mind to refer any natural phenomenon, the physical causation of which had not been ascertained, to the more or less immediate causal action of the Deity. But we now see that this habit of mind arose from a failure to distinguish between the essentially distinct characters of Science and Religion as departments of thought, and therefore that it was only so far as the Religion of former times ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... a savage cherishes this or that scrap as a 'fetish'? I give a string of explanations in Custom and Myth (pp. 229- 230). Sometimes the so-called fetish had an accidental, which was taken to be a causal, connection with a stroke of good luck. Sometimes the thing—an odd-shaped stone, say—had a superficial resemblance to a desirable object, and so was thought likely to aid in the acquisition of such objects by ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... characterizing the Japanese. Introduce a new social heredity,—a new system of education,—one which relegates a mechanical memory to the background,—one which exalts powers of rational observation of the profound causal relations of the phenomena of nature, and which sets a premium on such observation, analysis, and generalization, and the results will show the inherent psychic nature of the Oriental to be not different ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... by abstract meditation, that the Spirit or Self is distinct from its three bodies (viz. the gross, subtle and causal bodies), and that it is a portion of the one Spirit of the Universe (Brahma), every man ought to worship K.rish.na by means of that (self) ...
— The Siksha-Patri of the Swami-Narayana Sect • Professor Monier Williams (Trans.)
... yesterday, when under like conditions. We do expect, however, that this will not be the case in the physical realm; for example, we expect that a flame applied to dry paper will always set it alight. Indeed, the more we realize the causal relation as one of necessary determination, we come to see that things do not exist as we do ourselves, and distinction between physical and psychical events becomes clear. We perceive that we, in ourselves, are centres of indetermination ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... one that starts with facts or phenomena and, after observing a sufficient number of them, formulates a conclusion and tests it. This will result in real thinking—which is the same as "thinging." It is putting things into causal relation and constructing from them, unity out of diversity. To induce this habit of thought, to inspire this spirit of investigation and observation in children is the essence of teaching. To teach is to cause others to think, and the man or woman who ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Sporotrichum schenckii, and characterized by a suppurative inflammation of the subcutaneous lymph vessels and the neighboring lymph glands. Owing to the fact that this affection does not spread as an epizootic and that its causal factor is a fungus, the name ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture |
