ABSTRACT
Causal lines issuing from the same event may diverge to widely scattered events. A sportsman is shooting a gun in Yorkshire; a poet is writing a lyric in Bloomsbury; these events are different and seemingly unrelated. Both men however had ancestors who came over with the Conqueror, and it is safe to say that except for the Conqueror's action, neither would be where he is or doing what he is, if indeed he existed at all. (d) The two events are therefore causally connected, even though not connected directly. It would be strange to say that the sportsman's hooting in Yorkshire caused the poet's writing in Bloomsbury or vice versa. Nevertheless if one had not happened, neither probably would the other. Cancel the act of shooting, and you are committed to cancelling with it the sequence of causes that led up to it, including the action of the Conqueror, and if the Conqueror had not so acted, the sequence of causes leading to the poet's penning his lyric would likewise have to be cancelled. (e) Is it reasonable to hold that all events are thus bound up with each other causally? This is sometimes denied. We hear it said that events in the sun cannot be causally connected with simultaneous events on the earth, since even gravitation does not exceed the speed of light, and light takes some eight minutes to cover the distance. But this case does not differ in principle from the previous one. The two sets of events are connected, and connected causally, though in a roundabout way. Events on the sun eight minutes ago are the common source of events on both sun and earth, and because they are connected through this intermediary, neither group of events could have failed to happen without consequences for the other. But of course indirect causal relations are always based on direct ones. The law of gravitation is a causal law by which every particle in the universe is linked directly with an infinite number of others. Sir James Jeans remarked that 'every body pulls every other towards it, no matter how distant it may be. Newton's apple not only exerted its pull on the earth, but every star in the sky, and the motion of every star was affected by its fall. We cannot move a finger without disturbing all the stars.'l It was an astronomer who wrote this, not a speculative philosopher. As Russell says, 'the world of physics is intended to be a causally interconnected world, and must be such if it is not to be a groundless fairy tale, since our inferences depend upon causallaws'.2
