An introductory text-book of logic - Mellone, Sydney - Rare Books at ...

260 THE GENERAL NATURE OF INDUCTION.
8. Mill says
"
much of what he calls the Plurality
of Causes." This, he says, means that a fact may be
the uniform consequent of several different antecedents
e.g.,
"
many causes produce death ; many causes produce
motion; many causes produce a sensation" (III. x. i).
If so, how can the cause be the invariable antecedent,
to say nothing of the invariability being
"
uncondi
tional
of Causes
"
? The fact is that the doctrine of
"
is only true when the
"
Plurality
"
"
cause is understood
in a loose popular way, such as we referred to at the
end of 7. The plurality disappears before any exact
scientific investigation ; the doctrine is consistent only
with the popular and not with the scientific view of cause.
We may illustrate this by some of Mill s instances.
" There are many causes of motion," visible impact ;
heat ; electrical and magnetic action ; gravitation. Yet
the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, which rules
modern Physics, means practically that all motion in
matter is produced in the same way, namely, by other
motions in matter.
"
There are many causes of death."
But life is a complex process consisting of a multitude
of co-operating processes, of which some are directly
essential. If any one of these essential processes is
interfered with, life ceases ; and the interference can
only be of one kind. Hence there are many causes of
death only because there are many kinds of death ;
"death" is a fact as complex as "life." Again: "A
different causes." But the
disease may have many
youngest and most successful of recent scientific studies
sometimes called Bacteriology has proved beyond
doubt that many kinds of disease among those most
inimical to life are produced by the entrance into the
human body of one particular kind of the extremely
minute living organisms known as
"
microbes." Thus,