Monism and Meliorism Author:Paul Carus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FIRST CAUSE AND FINAL CAUSE. § 1. THE ANTINOMY OF FIRST CAUSE. Causality is the law of cause and effect, and nothing else. There is, however, such a confus... more »ion about the idea of cause, that we must be particularly careful; and in no language is the misuse and inadequacy of words greater than in English. Cause as well as effect is an event, or fact ; the cause is past, if the effect has ensued. Both are temporal, as they designate merely a state of affairs. So, as was stated above, cause is never a thing ; much less can a person be called a cause. I may cause some effect by some action, I may produce some result by my labor, and my person may be accessory to some event, even through its mere presence, but I myself am never a cause. The mistake is magnified, if God is called the first cause. First causes are of mere relative existence. They are the starting points of a series of some longer chain of causes and effects. According to La Place, the cause of the rotation in that gaseous nebula, from which our planets have been developed, was the unequal partition of matter. So it was the first cause in the formation of the solar system, which happened so many millions of years ago. It has passed as any cause passes that is merely some temporal event. We reject and condemn, therefore, the idea of a first cause in the sense of Creator, as a contradiction in itself. And those who call God the first cause have either a vague idea of what they mean, or they intend to say that God is the final principle of the world, the most generallaw, governing the whole universe, the fundamental basis, and, so to speak, the ground on which everything rests, from which all existences spring and originate, and the ultimate reason to which we trace the existence of the cosmos. Such a principle, or...« less