As the monad and the centre of a circle are images from their simplicity of this greatest of principles, so likewise do they perspicuously shadow forth to us its causal comprehension of all things.

For all number may be considered as subsisting occultly in the monad, and the circle in the centre; this occult being the same in each with causal subsistence.

Such parts too, when they proceed from their occult causal subsistence, and have a distinct being of their own, are nevertheless comprehended, though in a different manner, in their producing whole.

Adj. caused &c v.; causal, original; primary, primitive, primordial; aboriginal; protogenal^; radical; embryonic, embryotic^; in embryo, in ovo [Lat.]; seminal, germinal; at the bottom of; connate, having a common origin.

Yet it was necessary to mention them, because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal, or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, (which monsters were themselves introduced though playfully,) by the transfigured coachman of the Bath mail.

On the other hand, Vergil's master, while he affirms the causal nexus for the governance of the universe: nec sanctum numen fati protollere fines posse neque adversus naturae foedera niti [Footnote 4: The passages have been analyzed and discussed frequently.

The notion of causal connection was equally chimerical.

We can claim the right of causal analysis, and assume that our dissections have laid bare the inner springs of the connection of events.

Moreover, to the 'real world which our choice has built out of the chaos of 'appearances' we may hypothetically add 'infernal' and 'heavenly' regions.[B] Both are transformations of 'the given' by the will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience may confirm them.

Experience as it first comes to us is a mere flood of happenings, with no distinction between causal and casual sequences.

Nothing but voluntarism can enable logicians to see that our actual procedure in knowing is the reverse of this, that causal explanation is the analysis of a continuum, and that 'phenomena,' 'events,' 'effects,' and 'causes' are all creations of our selective attention; that in selecting them we run a risk of analyzing falsely, and that if we do, our 'inductions' will be worthless.

The principle of the complete causal determination of events retains its validity unimpeached for the sphere of the knowledge of the understanding, that is, for the realm of phenomena; while, on the other hand, it remains permissible for us to postulate another kind of causality for the realm of things in themselves, although we can have no idea of its how, and to ascribe to ourselves a free intelligible character.

Instead of a causal explanation of phenomena we are given an ideal interpretation of them.

When the causal irritant has been excessively severe and the migration of leucocytes abundant, actual formation of pus may occur, the bony tissue being broken down and mingled with it, and an abscess cavity formed.

The development of children's concepts of causal relations.

For the men of learning of those epochs, God, devil, angels, demons, hid the whole of Nature; no investigation was carried out to the end, no matter sifted to the bottom; everything that was beyond the most obvious causal nexus was immediately attributed to these; so that, as Pomponatius expressed himself at the time, Certe philosophi nihil verisimile habent ad haec, quare necesse est, ad Deum, ad angelos et daemones recurrere.

They make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things incomprehensible.

The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,in Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the Stoic Zeno,in Judea, the advent of Jesus,and in modern Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal facts which carry forward races to new convictions, and elevate the rule of life.

Science deals with that portion of the whole which is independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle of unchanging and necessary order in nature.

Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the soul.

This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a unit, technically called the action.

In all these varieties of action, the scene is the external world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal principle, obtaining in it.

The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a state of mind and a state of external fact.

The law may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in either case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life of what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in action.

The binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all.