Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/224

(Greek characters) (Quidquid ab immobili causa manat, immutabilem habet essentiam [substantiam]. Quidquid vero a mobili causa manat, essentiam habet mutabilem. Si enim illud, quod aliquid facit, est prorsus immobile, non per inotum, sed per ipsum Esse producit ipsum secundum ex se ipso.) Excellent! But just show me a cause which is not itself set in motion: it is simply impossible. But here, as in so many cases, abstraction has thought away all determinations down to that one which it is desired to make use of without regard to the fact that the latter cannot exist without the former. The only correct expression of the law of causality is this: Every change has its cause in another change which immediately precedes it. If something happens, i.e., if a new state of things appears, i.e., if something is changed, then something else must have changed immediately before, and something else again before this, and so on ad infinitum, for a first cause is as impossible to conceive as a beginning of time or a limit of space. More than this the law of causality does not assert. Thus its claims only arise in the case of changes. So long as nothing changes there can be no question of a cause. For there is no a priori ground for inferring from the existence of given things, i.e., states of matter, their previous non-existence, and from this again their coming into being, that is to say, there is no a priori ground for inferring a change. Therefore the mere existence of a thing does not justify us in inferring that it has a cause. Yet there may be a posteriori reasons, that is, reasons drawn from previous experience, for the assumption that the present state or condition did not always exist, but has only come into existence in consequence of another state, and therefore by means of a change, the cause of which is then to be sought, and also the cause of this cause. Here then we are involved in