ABSTRACT

The conception of things as interacting leads to the two problems of Change and Causality. The paradoxical character of change due to the fact that only what is permanent can change. Change is succession within an identity; this identity, like that of Substance, must be teleological. The problem presented by the apparently unceasing mutability of existence is one of the earliest as well as one of the most persistent in the whole range of Philosophy. The “natural view of the world” unhesitatingly accepts the cases as instances of interaction or Transeunt Causality on exactly the same level as the origination of change of state in one body by change in another, and Descartes himself had acquiesced in this interpretation. In any sense in which there are a plurality of things, and in which the principle of ground and consequence can be approximately represented by the causal determination of subsequent occurrences by anterior occurrences.