Project Gutenberg #72981
Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1927Russell's survey of knowledge from behaviourist psychology through modern physics to ethics and the great philosophers; published in Britain as An Outline of Philosophy.
Project Gutenberg #72981 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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a billiard-ball; we should do better to think of it as like a ghost, which has no “pushiness” and yet can make you fly. We have to change our notions both of substance and of cause. To say that an atom persists is like saying that a tune persists. If a tune takes five minutes to play, we do not conceive of it as a single thing which exists throughout that time, but as a series of notes, so related as to form a unity. In the case of the tune, the unity is æsthetic; in the case of the atom, it is causal. But when I say “causal” I do not mean exactly what the word naturally conveys. There must be no idea of compulsion or “force”, neither the force of contact which we imagine we see between billiard-balls nor the action at a distance which was formerly supposed to constitute gravitation. There is merely an observed law of succession from next to next. An event at one moment is succeeded by an event at a neighbouring moment, which, to the first order of small quantities, can be calculated from the earlier event. This enables us to construct a string of events, each, approximately, growing out of a slightly earlier event according to an intrinsic law. Outside influences only affect the second order of small quantities. A string of events connected, in this way, by an approximate intrinsic law of development is called one piece of matter. This is what I mean by saying that the unity of a piece of matter is causal. I shall explain this notion more fully in later chapters.