________________
CAUSATION AND EVOLUTION.
Mill on the
cause and
cause.
of making the Patient to be the Agent ?
Indeed there is a school of logic predominent in these days of scientific culture which refuses to make any distinction between the Determining cause and the Substantial cause in the law of causation. Even the Determining most classical of the English logicians, as Substantial Mr. Mill, has taken exception to this distinction. "In most cases of causation," writes Mill, "a distinction is commonly drawn between something which acts and some other thing which is acted upon, between an agent and a patient. Both of these, it would be universally allowed, are conditions of the phenomenon ; but it would be thought absurd to call the latter the cause—that title being reserved for the former."
The distinction, contends Mr. Mill in sup. port, is a verbal one and not real, because of its vanishing on examination : for the of Mill. object which is acted upon and which is considered as the scene in which the effect takes place is commonly included in the phrase by which the effect is spoken of, so that if it were also reckoned as a part of the cause, the seeming incongruity would
223
Arguments
