The Motor Cause and the Modern
Mind
Grant me the grace, O
merciful God, to desire
ardently all that is pleasing
to Thee, to examine it
prudently, to acknowledge
it truthfully, and to
accomplish it perfectly, for
the praise and glory of Thy
name. Amen.

Regina Cœli Academy
Natural Philosophy – Physics
Lecturer: Mr. Alan Aversa

Prayer of St. Thomas which he was
accustomed to recite everyday before the
image of Jesus Christ.

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No extrinsic causes ⇒ world would be
indeterminate.

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Lecture outline:
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How his conception applies to empiriological physics
Causality according to Kant, Hume’s disciple

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Motor cause not absolutely intrinsic, equal, or
extrinsic to effect.

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Causality according to Hegel, Marx, and emergent
evolutionism

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Hume rejected motor causality and concluded
that causality is a temporal succession.
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Hume’s conception of causality
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He thought knowledge does not go beyond
sensations; this is empiricism.
Example: According to Hume, does an alarm
clock cause a sleeping man to awake?

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Is every succession causal?
Reid’s refutation of Hume: “Night and day follow one another,
but does night cause day and vice versa?”

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Pure empiriological physics ignores causes.

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Is causality measurable?

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Causality reduces to prediction in time.
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Hume’s causality reduces to a functional relationship:
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For the function y = f(x), does x cause y?

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Are only functional relationships needed in science?
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If so, Russel would be right: “The barometer has ceased to have any
effect upon the weather.”
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This is adequate for the “merely descriptive
enterprise” of empiriological physics.

True causality:
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Cause and effect distinct,

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yet not not disconnected, as in Hume’s conception.

Since the barometric fluctuations forecast and thus precede the weather.

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Empiriological Physics Finds a
Place for Hume

Hume: Causality is purely a psychological association of
otherwise unrelated events.
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A cause does not influence the effect; it simply
precedes it in time.

As a Cartesian, he denied substances.

Hume Contradicts Reason
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Hume Viewed Causality as
Succession

A Science Must be Causal
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Kant Made Causality an Apriorism
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Apriorism = “employment of a priori reasoning”
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A priori = “Prior to experience; innate in the mind.”
(OED).

Kant agreed with Hume that:
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∄ motor causes.

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Causality is an association of mental states.

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Causality/association results from a mental habit.
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Self-motion ⇒ indeterminism.

Thus there must be outside motor causes.
“Motion implies a type of inner penetration by the motor into its
subject.”
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Relativity theory denies absolute space and time.

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⇏ “motion involves physical compenetration”.

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“Does the motor contribute something of its
own being to the effect”?
Descartes: Locomotion sole kind of movement,
a “physical transfer of parts”
Is radium’s emission of an α-particle the cause
or effect of its radioactivity?
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Empiriological physics call this “spontaneous”
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Viz., in empiriological physics, cause and effect equated

Aquinas: “Mover and mobile are together.” (Motus et
movens sunt simul.)
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“Moved and mover are together but not the
same, different but not distant.”

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A poet is not his poem, as a Cartesian would say!
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Patients have passion.

Suarez “held that action is formally in the
patient”.

Example: Poet leaving something of himself in his poem
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Agents have action.

Passion: “a receiving something from another”
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Neoplatonic idea of emanation: motor causality,
while not destroying itself, conferring a form on the
moved
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Knowledge: the “becoming of other as other”

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Action: “a doing something to another”
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Analogies to understand the relationship
between mover and moved:
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Empiriological Physics Equates
Cause and Effect

Causes Move by Contact

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Motors are not strictly extrinsic. (Leibniz disagrees.)

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This suggests possibility of “temporal reversibility.”

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Humean self-motion impossible

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Uncertainty principle ⇒ universe not ordered.

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A Cause is not Absolutely Intrinsic

A cause influences an effect; there is an “influx” from the
cause into effect.
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A Cause is not Absolutely Extrinsic

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This began the mutual alienation of philosophical
and empiriological physics.

Quantum and relativity theories challenge
Hume’s and Kant’s dogma:

Kant’s: Causality is a priori, innate in the mind.

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Kant basically said “that ontological realities are
simply anthropomorphisms” which we project
onto reality.
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Kant disagreed with Hume that
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Kant Made Causality an Apriorism

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But this reduces to a denial of the extrinsic
character of motor causes ⇒ mobile universe of
self-motion.
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Empiriological Physics Equates
Cause and Effect
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A parallelism:
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(action : passion) :: [action : reaction]
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Empiriological Physics Equates
Cause and Effect

Words in () are terms with traditional meaning, and words
in [] are terms with empiriological physics meaning.

This parallelism is not perfect ∵ reactions
rebound onto their actions in empiriological
physics; ∴, reactions become actions, too.

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Empiriological physics: action = passion,
passion = action.
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Law of Equivalence

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The Cause-Effect Equation Fails to
Explain Novelty
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Reaction = motion, mover = moved;
∴, reaction = mover, so there is no cause or effect at all!
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Empiriological physics explains this by saying:
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But surely the horse is doing something!
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Recall: Entropy is a measure of disorder, or,
equivalently, the measure of the amount of usable
energy.

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If cause = effect, how can there be novelty in the
universe?
Motion breeds novelty.
Aquinas: “every new reality needs an innovating
principle.”
Example: “[I]f each man gave back to the world
only what he got out of it, there would be no
progress in” human endeavors.
Nature is more “than a mere mathematical
balance.”
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“Nature is an intrinsic source and principle in things.”
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But how does that explain novelty?
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Cause = effect.

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∴, Nature ≠ inertial forces acting from without.

Movement results from the originality in nature, not
from equality.
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Is entropy reducible to the law of action and
reaction?

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But how does entropy explain novelty?

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Reality completely determined from the outside

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Nature is an Innovating Principle

Empiriological physics tries to explain motion as
being a result of entropy.
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Entropy Fails to Explain Causation
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Newton’s 3rd Law supports his 1st Law (Law of
Inertia).

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“Suppose a horse were attempting to pull a
wagon up a hill (action [or mover]) but that the
opposing forces (reaction) were just sufficient to
balance out the pull on the horse. The wagon
and the horse would never move.”
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Law of Equivalence ⇒ Conservation of Momentum

The Cause-Effect Equation Fails to
Explain Novelty

If cause = effect, how can there be motion?

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Ernst Mach: “A body that presses or pulls another
body is, according to Newton, pressed or pulled in
exactly the same degree by that other body. Pressure
and counter-pressure, force and counter-force, are
always equal to each other” (Science of Mechanics,
p. 199).

Its motions have their origin in the Prime Mover.

To summarize: There must be a difference between:
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Mover and moved

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Action and passion (in wide sense)

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Action and reaction

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Cause and effect

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We did not discuss the following slides in class, but please study them.

Hegel Does not Lead to True
Hierarchy

Action is Different from Passion
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Action and passion “involve a difference in
directionality within a movement.”

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If action = reaction (passion), then every nature
would be able to move itself.

He explained dynamism with dialectical triad:

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However, they wanted to explain motion without the
need for an extrinsic Prime Mover.

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Emergent evolutionists: Santayana, Alexander,
Whitehead, Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, MacDougall,
Smuts, and Sellars
They “vitalize” matter, so matter moves itself
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Something cannot contain its contraries.

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V. E. Smith’s Philosophical Physics
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Adopted by philosophers biased toward the empiriological
method
They are right that causes determine effects
They are wrong that cause = effect.
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Is correct in accenting the “spontaneity of nature” and
“inequalities in motion”
Is incorrect in making cause and effect unrelated.

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I will post PDF of the reading on the reginacoeli.box.com
page.

Suggested Readings

Solution: matter and form united by an efficient cause;
this is hylemorphism (matter-form dualism).

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Please finish reading ch. 7 (The Motor Cause and
the Modern Mind).
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Emergent evolutionism
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Strict empiricism
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References

Two extremes on a spectrum:
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This is counter to the “orthodox empiriological method,”
But “ultraempiriological” in “forcing” “the Cartesian and
Humean” premises “to wring” vitalism out of matter.

Naturalism also adopts emergent evolutionism.

Dualism Harmonizes Modern
Oppositions
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Emergent evolutionism rejects mechanism of
matter and upholds its spontaneous character.

Lenin: “A is A” is an “intolerable vacuity.”

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Slave (thesis) + Slave Owner (antithesis) → somebody
surpassing them both (synthesis)

He thus equates being and non-being.

“Hegel insisted on the Absolute”, yet he was a
pantheist.

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Thesis + Antithesis → Synthesis.

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“Matter according to Communism is self-moved
and hence self-explanatory.”
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“Whatever exists (thesis) calls its opposite into being
(antithesis).”

Emergent Evolution Denies CauseEffect Equality

Marx and Engels followers of Hegel
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Man can be both “agent and patient of his own
actions”.

Marxian Dynamism Impossible

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Hegelianism emphasizes process.
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Efficient causes are always greater than their
effects.

Hegel a neo-Heraclitian

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But every nature is certainly not alive!

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Hegel: Universe is pure becoming.
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Action initiates; passion receives.

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De Finance, Joseph, Être et agir (Paris, 1945)
Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald, God, His Existence
and Nature, transl. B. Rose (London, 1934), Vol. I.
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