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[Causality in Aristotle's Metaphysics]
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[Causality in Aristotle’s
I suggested in the preceding paper that the distinction between matter and form held good only so far as we were compelled to consider any substance under a temporal aspect.
Now as the analysis into matter and form is a temporary instrument for handling temporal reality, so the efficient and final causes as well as the material and formal have their being with regard to perishable substance only, and are gradually taken up and included within the substance as we approach nearer and nearer to the real. Their relation is indeed analogous to that of matter and of form: they are the dynamic categories of cause, as the former are the static. As in illustrating the distinction of matter and form, so the simplest and most immediate cases of efficient cause and end are those of human activity. In questioning the possibility of completely external cause, in investigating the relation of agent and patient and in passing from lower to higher grades of reality, we are led to find the real to be that which is its own source of movement and its own source of value. Whether Aristotle makes this conception, or that of a whole in which form and matter shall be completely one, intelligible, is an unanswerable question. But in discussing his use of the concepts of efficient and final cause, it must be remembered that what is described is a process which is not completely apprehensible at any one level of experience; and that the most that Aristotle can do–and
The efficient cause is primarily the motion which terminated in this result, or the motion which originated the motion which is this result: whether the object is itself a movement, or the end of motion, the cause is a motion which is distinct. But it is, of course, movement inhering in a substance; so we speak more loosely of the one substance as the efficient cause of the other, the sculptor qua sculptor, or the father qua father. Evidently, the cause and the effect cannot be completely heterogeneous from each other; agent and patient must be alike in some respect. The relation may be further generalised beyond that of particular cause to particular effect: not only the physician, but the science of medicine, is the cause of health. Three grades or types, at least, may be distinguished: mechanical causation, as the influence of one body in space upon another or of one element upon another; self causation, as a man is the cause of his own actions; and the causation of any result by the art or science rather than by the individual man through which it operates. Clearly in any σύνθεσις the δύναμις