one thing is the cause, and another thing is the effect. That is the original form of the use of the causal relation, and it is chiefly found in organic life. The flower comes from the plant, the fruit from the tree, the ovum or the young from the mother. In such expressions as springing from, growing from, coming from, etc., in using the preposition "from" for the causal relation, language bears witness to the impression which contained this first form of causality. But if we interrogate science it assures us that this relation holds only for phenomenal things, for the momentary inherence-complexes of perception. The true things, the substances, neither come into existence nor pass out of it.
Windelband's first type of causation, then, may be called a "thing to thing" cause, or a "thing from thing" cause. By contrast, his second type of causality may be labeled a "thing to state" or "thing to activity" cause:
The thing is regarded as the cause of its states and its activities. We thus speak to some extent of man as the cause of his actions, of the soul as the common cause of its various functions, of the body - especially the organic body - as the cause of its movements. In developing those ideas we interpose, between the one thing and the multiplicity of its effects, the forces by means of which the substance exercises its causality. By this we understand certain general properties, capacities, or powers; and in this sense the attributes are at times called the cause of the modi. In the inner world the will is supposed to be the cause of volitions, the intelligence the cause of opinions, and so on. In the external world we find gravity, inertia, and vital forces filling the gap. Force is expressly defined as the cause of movement, and is thus regarded as a property of thing, the substratum, the matter, the substance. From the logical point of view all these forces are general concepts, assumed as the causes of the various functions. We easily see that the general thing, the force, is never the exclusive cause of the activity in question. In order to pass into such a special function, it always needs some occasion of action.
Windelband is aware here that this quarter of his causal analysis closely mirrors a quarter of Aristotle's:
We therefore distinguish between efficient and occasional causes: causa efficiens and causa occasionalis. It is clear that the two together make up the entire "cause"; just as in the analogous case of a syllogism the full ground for the conclusion is in the combination of the two premises, the "major" and the "minor." This is also a very familiar way of looking at things, and there are many variations of it; but it shows us from the start how uncertain it is which is the real cause, the efficient or the occasional or both together.
In addition to acknowledging his debt to Aristotle - by borrowing from Scholastic vocabulary - Windelband is also defying Hume: Windelband's analysis of causation is precisely the target for Hume's critiques. Moving on to the third of his four causes, Windelband describes it in contrast to the second type: it is
the converse of the preceding: states and activities are the causes of things. It is often said, for instance that the wind (which is a state or mode of motion) causes clouds. Many people say that insects are produced by the rain, which we regard as essentially a process, without inquiring into the thing that is moved. A house is put together by a number of activities; who exercises them is immaterial, as the functions are the immediate causes of the house. If in this way we come to treat the functions, detached from the things which discharge them, as independent causes of other things, we come in the end to the theory of the complete detachment of forces and functions. The dynamic view of nature, which Kant and Schelling held, falls into this class. Attraction and repulsion are forces of the primary reality, and matter is merely produced by them. The system is developed in a much more complicated form in Schelling's philosophy of nature.
In Windelband's explanation of his third cause, we see how he is historically located between Aristotelian physics in the past, and modern views of space-time in the future, with the German idealists as some type of midpoint. Neither a quasi-Aristotelian view of causation, nor a consideration of matter as merely a shorthand for the intersection of various forces without its own independent existence, are unique. The combination of the two, however, make Windelband potentially more philosophically interesting. Somewhat predictably, his fourth type of cause is
the causal relation between states: one is the cause and the other the effect. This situation holds for the immanent as well as the transgredient event. In the first case it is psychic, as when we say that perception causes memory (by association), or the willing of the end is the cause of the willing of the means (resolution), or the knowledge of the reason is the psychic cause of the knowledge of the conclusion (deduction). But even in the case of the physical immanent event we have this form of causality, especially in such complex structures as organisms. The digestion, for instance, is understood to be the cause of the formation of blood, of the peripheral stimulation of the nerves the cause of the central process in the brain. From the purely physical points of view, it is true, processes of this kind are resolved into transgredient events from member to member, and ultimately atom to atmo. It is in these mechanical transgredient events that we find this fourth form of causality in its simplest shape: the movement of the impelling body is the cause and the movement of the impelled body is the effect.
In using the word 'transgredient' Windelband introduces a bit of jargon. He explains the use of this word by contrasting 'transgredient event' with 'immanent event':
One case is where the event occurs in one thing. In one and the same thing A appear the states a1 and a2 in a definite succession. The thing, in other words, passes from one of its states to another. We will call this variety the immanent event. In our experience it is found chiefly in the psychic life, in which one presentation or emotion follows another in definite succession in one and the same subject of consciousness. This immanent change of state may, however, occur in a body: in one, for instance, which continues to move in a given direction at a certain speed in virtue of inertia. As a rule the material event is of the other type: it occurs between several different things. With state a of the thing A state b of the thing B is connected in a clear and invariable sequence. If we call this the transgredient event, because it passes from one thing to another, we must admit that we have no experience of such direct happening between different souls. If an event is to pass from one soul to another, it must be done by the mediation of bodies; and we thus get two sorts of transgredient events - the physical, between two bodies, and the psychological between sould and body or body and soul. In such cases, where is the unity of the event, which in the immanent event is based upon the identity of the thing? What in the case of transgredient events holds together the different states of different things in unity? We conceive this unity in the sense that the sequence is not merely a fact (like the world and the whistle in our preceding example), but that the states, which together make up the event, are necessarily connected in this sequence. The event therefore implies the necessity of a clear and invariable succession of states.
Earlier in the text, Windelband given the example:
A word spoken in the house, followed by the whistle of a passing locomotive, does not make an "event," no matter how objectively the succession is determined. They lack any real connection.
Hayden White (born 1928 in Tennessee) explains that Windelband's interest in causation is central to his larger philosophical system. Windelband distinguishes between natural "nomothetic" sciences and historical "idiographic" sciences; the two are different not because of their objects, but rather because of their methods. Windelband, according to Hayden White, posits that any object can be studied by both types of science. One distinguishing feature of nomothetic sciences is causation. Therefore, White writes,
any given object could be studied by both kinds of science. A mental event, if viewed under the aspect of physical causality - as an instance of the working of some general law - was a natural event. That same mental event, described in its individuality and valued for its deviation from the class to which it belonged, because an object of the idiographic sciences.
Thus it is important for Windelband's project that causality be so analyzed that it can apply to everything, making any object a potential object for nomothetic sciences, while also leaving other aspect of any object as the object for idiographic sciences.
