The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Introduction to Philosophy, by George

situation at the next instant, and in this whole situation the condition of the second ball has its 
place as well as that of the first. 
 
If, then, we insist that to have causal efficiency is the same thing as to be active, we should also 
admit that the second ball was active, and quite as active as the first.  It has certainly had as much 
to do with the total result.  But it offends us to speak of it in this way.  We prefer to say that the 
first was active and the second was acted upon. What is the source of this distinction? 
 
Its original source is to be found in the judgments we pass upon conscious beings, bodies with 
minds; and it could never have been drawn if men had not taken into consideration the relations 
of minds to the changes in the physical world.  As carried over to inanimate things it is a 
transferred distinction; and its transference to this field is not strictly justifiable, as has been 
indicated above. 
 
I must make this clear by an illustration.  I hurry along a street towards the university, because 
the hour for my lecture is approaching. I am struck down by a falling tile.  In my advance up the 
street I am regarded as active; in my fall to the ground I am regarded as passive. 
 
Now, looking at both occurrences from the purely physical point of view, we have nothing 
before us but a series of changes in the space relations of certain masses of matter; and in all 
 
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 Chap. XI – Other Problems of World and Mind 
those changes both my body and its environment are concerned.  As I advance, my body cannot 
be regarded as the sole cause of the changes which are taking place.  My progress would be 
impossible without the aid of the ground upon which I tread. Nor can I accuse the tile of being 
the sole cause of my demolition.  Had I not been what I was and where I was, the tile would have 
fallen in vain.  I must be regarded as a concurrent cause of my own disaster, and my unhappy 
state is attributable to me as truly as it is to the tile. 
 
Why, then, am I in the one case regarded as active and in the other as passive?  In each case I am 
a cause of the result.  How does it happen that, in the first instance, I seem to most men to be the 
cause, and in the second to be not a cause at all?  The rapidity of my motion in the first instance 
cannot account for this judgment.  He who rides in the police van and he who is thrown from the 
car of a balloon may move with great rapidity and yet be regarded as passive. 
 
Men speak as they do because they are not content to point out the physical antecedents of this 
and that occurrence and stop with that. They recognize that, between my advance up the street 
and my fall to the ground there is one very important difference.  In the first case what is 
happening may be referred to an idea in my mind.  Were the idea not there, I should not do what 
I am doing.  In the second case, what has happened cannot be referred to an idea in my mind. 
 
Here we have come to the recognition that there are such things as purposes and ends; that an 
idea and some change in the external world may be related as plan and accomplishment.  In other 
words, we have been brought face to face with what has been given the somewhat misleading 
name of final cause.  In so far as that in the bringing about of which I have had a share is my 
end, I am active; in so far as it is not my end, but comes upon me as something not planned, I am 
passive.  The enormous importance of the distinction may readily be seen; it is only in so far as I 
am a creature who can have purposes, that desire and will, foresight and prudence, right and 
wrong, can have a significance for me. 
 
I have dwelt upon the meaning of the words “activity” and “passivity,” and have been at pains to 
distinguish them from cause and effect, because the two pairs of terms have often been 
confounded with each other, and this confusion has given rise to a peculiarly unfortunate error.  
It is this error that lies at the foundation of the objection referred to at the beginning of this 
section. 
 
We have seen that certain men of science are inclined to look upon the physical world as a great 
system, all the changes in which may be accounted for by an appeal to physical causes.  And we 
have seen that the parallelist regards ideas, not as links in this chain, but as parallel with physical 
changes. 
 
It is argued by some that, if this is a true view of things, we must embrace the conclusion that the