§1. Natural Classes

212. Efficient causation, on the other hand, is a compulsion determined by the particular condition of things, and is a compulsion acting to make that situation begin to change in a perfectly determinate way; and what the general character of the result may be in no way concerns the efficient causation. For example, I shoot at an eagle on the wing; and since my purpose — a special sort of final, or ideal, cause — is to hit the bird, I do not shoot directly at it, but a little ahead of it, making allowance for the change of place by the time the bullet gets to that distance. So far, it is an affair of final causation. But after the bullet leaves the rifle, the affair is turned over to the stupid efficient causation, and should the eagle make a swoop in another direction, the bullet does not swerve in the least, efficient causation having no regard whatsoever for results, but simply obeying orders blindly. It is true that the force of the bullet conforms to a law; and the law is something general. But for that very reason the law is not a force. For force is compulsion; and compulsion is hic et nunc. It is either that or it is no compulsion. Law, without force to carry it out, would be a court without a sheriff; and all its dicta would be vaporings. Thus, the relation of law, as a cause, to the action of force, as its effect, is final, or ideal, causation, not efficient causation. The relation is somewhat similar to that of my pulling the hair trigger of my rifle, when the cartridge explodes with a force of its own, and off goes the bullet in blind obedience to perform the special instantaneous beginning of an act that it is, each instant, compelled to commence. It is a vehicle of compulsion hic et nunc, receiving and transmitting it; while I receive and transmit ideal influence, of which I am a vehicle.

213. When we speak of an »idea,« or »notion,« or »conception of the mind,« we are most usually thinking — or trying to think — of an idea abstracted from all efficiency. But a court without a sheriff, or the means of creating one, would not be a court at all; and did it ever occur to you, my reader, that an idea without efficiency is something equally absurd and unthinkable? Imagine such an idea if you can! Have you done so? Well, where did you get this idea? If it was communicated to you viva voce from another person, it must have had efficiency enough to get the particles of air vibrating. If you read it in a newspaper, it had set a monstrous printing press in motion. If you thought it out yourself, it had caused something to happen in your brain. And again, how do you know that you did have the idea when this discussion began a few lines above, unless it had efficiency to make some record on the brain? The court cannot be imagined without a sheriff. Final causality cannot be imagined without efficient causality; but no whit the less on that account are their modes of action polar contraries. The sheriff would still have his fist, even if there were no court; but an efficient cause, detached from a final cause in the form of a law, would not even possess efficiency: it might exert itself, and something might follow post hoc, but not propter hoc; for propter implies potential regularity. Now without law there is no regularity; and without the influence of ideas there is no potentiality.

214. The light of these reflections brings out into distinct view characters of our definition of a real class which we might otherwise have overlooked or misinterpreted. Every class has its definition, which is an idea; but it is not every class where the existence, that is, the occurrence in the universe of its members is due to the active causality of the defining idea of the class. That circumstance makes the epithet natural particularly appropriate to the class. The word natura evidently must originally have meant birth; although even in the oldest Latin it very seldom bears that meaning. There is, however, a certain sub-conscious memory of that meaning in many phrases; just as with words from {physis}, there is the idea of springing forth, or a more vegetable-like production, without so much reference to a progenitor. Things, it may be, {phyetai} spontaneously; but nature is an inheritance.

215. Heredity, of which so much has been said since 1860, is not a force but a law, although, like other laws, it doubtless avails itself of forces. But it is essentially that the offspring shall have a general resemblance to the parent, not that this general resemblance happens to result from this or that blind and particular action. No doubt, there is some blind efficient causation; but it is not that which constitutes the heredity, but, on the contrary, the general resemblance.

216. So, then, those naturalists are right who hold that the action of evolution in reproduction produces real classes, as by the very force of the words it produces natural classes. In considering the classification of sciences, however, we have no need of penetrating the mysteries of biological development; for the generation here is of ideas by ideas — unless one is to say, with many logicians, that ideas arise from the consideration of facts in which there are no such ideas, nor any ideas. That opinion is a superficial one, allied, on one side of it, to the notion that the only final cause is a purpose. So, those logicians imagine that an idea has to be connected with a brain, or has to inhere in a »soul.« This is preposterous: the idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea. The soul does for the idea just what the cellulose does for the beauty of the rose; that is to say, it affords it opportunity. It is the court-sheriff, the arm of the law.

217. I fear I may be producing the impression of talking at random. It is that I wish the reader to »catch on« to my conception, my point of view; and just as one cannot make a man see that a thing is red, or is beautiful, or is touching, by describing redness, beauty, or pathos, but can only point to something else that is red, beautiful, or pathetic, and say, »Look here too for something like that there,« so if the reader has not been in the habit of conceiving ideas as I conceive them, I can only cast a sort of dragnet into his experience and hope that it may fish up some instance in which he shall have had a similar conception. Do you think, reader, that it is a positive fact that

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,«

 

or do you think that this, being poetry, is only a pretty fiction? Do you think that, notwithstanding the horrible wickedness of every mortal wight, the idea of right and wrong is nevertheless the greatest power on this earth, to which every knee must sooner or later bow or be broken down; or do you think that this is another notion at which common sense should smile? Even if you are of the negative opinion, still you must acknowledge that the affirmative is intelligible. Here, then, are two instances of ideas which either have, or are believed to have, life, the power of bringing things to pass, here below. Perhaps you may object that right and wrong are only a power because there are, or will be, powerful men who are disposed to make them so; just as they might take it into their heads to make tulip-fancying, or freemasonry, or Volapük a power. But you must acknowledge that this is not the position of those on the affirmative side. On the contrary, they hold that it is the idea which will create its defenders, and render them powerful. They will say that if it be that freemasonry or its foe, the Papacy, ever pass away — as perhaps either may — it will be precisely because they are ideas devoid of inherent, incorruptible vitality, and not at all because they have been unsupplied with stalwart defenders. Thus, whether you accept the opinion or not, you must see that it is a perfectly intelligible opinion that ideas are not all mere creations of this or that mind, but on the contrary have a power of finding or creating their vehicles, and having found them, of conferring upon them the ability to transform the face of the earth.

218. If you ask what mode of being is supposed to belong to an idea that is in no mind, the reply will come that undoubtedly the idea must be embodied (or ensouled — it is all one) in order to attain complete being, and that if, at any moment, it should happen that an idea — say that of physical decency — was quite unconceived by any living being, then its mode of being (supposing that it was not altogether dead) would consist precisely in this, namely, that it was about to receive embodiment (or ensoulment) and to work in the world. This would be a mere potential being, a being in futuro; but it would not be the utter nothingness which would befall matter (or spirit) if it were to be deprived of the governance of ideas, and thus were to have no regularity in its action, so that throughout no fraction of a second could it steadily act in any general way. For matter would thus not only not actually exist, but it would not have even a potential existence, since potentiality is an affair of ideas. It would be just downright Nothing.

219. It so happens that I myself believe in the eternal life of the ideas Truth and Right. I need not, however, insist upon that for my present purpose, and have only spoken of them in order to make my meaning clear. What I do insist upon is not now the infinite vitality of those particular ideas, but that every idea has in some measure, in the same sense that those are supposed to have it in unlimited measure, the power to work out physical and psychical results. They have life, generative life.

That it is so is a matter of experiential fact. But whether it is so or not is not a question to be settled by producing a microscope or telescope or any recondite observations of any kind. Its evidence stares us all in the face every hour of our lives. Nor is any ingenious reasoning needed to make it plain. If one does not see it, it is for the same reason that some men have not a sense of sin; and there is nothing for it but to be born again and become as a little child. If you do not see it, you have to look upon the world with new eyes.

220. I may be asked what I mean by the objects of [a] class deriving their existence from an idea. Do I mean that the idea calls new matter into existence? Certainly not. That would be pure intellectualism, which denies that blind force is an element of experience distinct from rationality, or logical force. I believe that to be a great error; but I need not stop to disprove it now, for those who entertain it will be on my side in regard to classification. But it will be urged that if that is not my meaning, then the idea merely confers upon the members of the class its character; and since every class has a defining character, any one class is as »natural« or »real« as another, if that term be taken in the sense I give to it. I cannot, however, quite admit that. Whether or not every class is or is not more or less a natural class is a question which may be worth consideration; but I do not think that the relation of the idea to the members of the natural class is simply that it is applicable to them as a predicate, as it is to every class equally. What I mean by the idea's conferring existence upon the individual members of the class is that it confers upon them the power of working out results in this world, that it confers upon them, that is to say, organic existence, or, in one word, life. The existence of an individual man is a totally different thing from the existence of the matter which at any given instant happens to compose him, and which is incessantly passing in and out. A man is a wave, but not a vortex. Even the existence of the vortex, though it does happen to contain, while it lasts, always the same particles, is a very different thing from the existence of these particles. Neither does the existence of wave or vortex consist merely in the fact that something is true of whatever particles compose them; although it is inseparably bound up with that fact. Let me not be understood as proposing any new definitions of a vortex and a wave. What I mean is this. Take a corpse: dissect it, more perfectly than it ever was dissected. Take out the whole system of blood vessels entire, as we see them figured in the books. Treat the whole systems of spinal and sympathetic nerves, the alimentary canal with its adjuvants, the muscular system, the osseous system, in the same way. Hang these all in a cabinet so that from a certain point of view each appears superposed over the others in its proper place. That would be a singularly instructive specimen. But to call it a man would be what nobody would for an instant do or dream. Now the best definition that ever was framed is, at best, but a similar dissection. It will not really work in the world as the object defined will. It will enable us to see how the thing works, in so far as it shows the efficient causation. The final causation, which is what characterizes the definitum, it leaves out of account. We make smoke rings. We make one pass through another, and perform various experiments, which give us an imperfect idea, yet some idea, of what a vortex really is. How all these things happen can be traced out from the definition. But the rôle that vortices really play in the universe — no insignificant one, if all matter is built of them — the real life of them, depends upon the idea of them, which simply finds its opportunity in those circumstances that are enumerated in the definition. Efficient causation is that kind of causation whereby the parts compose the whole; final causation is that kind of causation whereby the whole calls out its parts. Final causation without efficient causation is helpless; mere calling for parts is what a Hotspur, or any man, may do; but they will not come without efficient causation. Efficient causation without final causation, however, is worse than helpless, by far; it is mere chaos; and chaos is not even so much as chaos, without final causation; it is blank nothing.

221. The writer of a book can do nothing but set down the items of his thought. For the living thought, itself, in its entirety, the reader has to dig into his own soul. I think I have done my part, as well as I can. I am sorry to have left the reader an irksome chore before him. But he will find it worth the doing.

222. So then, a natural class being a family whose members are the sole offspring and vehicles of one idea, from which they derive their peculiar faculty, to classify by abstract definitions is simply a sure means of avoiding a natural classification. I am not decrying definitions. I have a lively sense of their great value in science. I only say that it should not be by means of definitions that one should seek to find natural classes. When the classes have been found, then it is proper to try to define them; and one may even, with great caution and reserve, allow the definitions to lead us to turn back and see whether our classes ought not to have their boundaries differently drawn. After all, boundary lines in some cases can only be artificial, although the classes are natural, as we saw in the case of the kets. When one can lay one's finger upon the purpose to which a class of things owes its origin, then indeed abstract definition may formulate that purpose. But when one cannot do that, but one can trace the genesis of a class and ascertain how several have been derived by different lines of descent from one less specialized form, this is the best route toward an understanding of what the natural classes are. This is true even in biology; it is much more clearly so when the objects generated are, like sciences, themselves of the nature of ideas.

223. There are cases where we are quite in the dark, alike concerning the creating purpose and concerning the genesis of things; but [there are cases] where we find a system of classes connected with a system of abstract ideas — most frequently numbers — and that in such a manner as to give us reason to guess that those ideas in some way, usually obscure, determine the possibilities of the things. For example, chemical compounds, generally — or at least the more decidedly characterized of them, including, it would seem, the so-called elements — seem to belong to types, so that, to take a single example, chlorates KClO[3], manganates ¹⁾ KMnO[3], bromates KBrO[3], rutheniates ²⁾ KRuO[3], iodates KIO[3], behave chemically in strikingly analogous ways. That this sort of argument for the existence of natural classes — I mean the argument drawn from types, that is, from a connection between the things and a system of formal ideas — may be much stronger and more direct than one might expect to find it, is shown by the circumstance that ideas themselves — and are they not the easiest of all things to classify naturally, with assured truth? — can be classified on no other grounds than this, except in a few exceptional cases. Even in these few cases, this method would seem to be the safest. For example, in pure mathematics, almost all the classification reposes on the relations of the forms classified to numbers or other multitudes. Thus, in topical geometry, figures are classified according to the whole numbers attached to their choresis, cyclosis, periphraxis, apeiresis, etc. As for the exceptions, such as the classes of hessians, jacobians, invariants, vectors, etc., they all depend upon types, too, although upon types of a different kind. It is plain that it must be so; and all the natural classes of logic will be found to have the same character.