The Kinds of Cause

Some causes are starting causes, some are sustaining causes, some are assisting causes, and some are indispensable causes. Those that first supply the occasion for something to come about are starting causes. Beauty, for instance, is the cause of love in a man with no self-control: when he sees it, it alone produces the desire in him — though not necessarily. Causes are sustaining causes, which are also called in the same sense complete in themselves, whenever a cause is able to produce its effect by itself, independently. All the kinds of cause can be set out in order in the case of a student. The father is the starting cause of the learning, the teacher the sustaining cause, the student’s own nature the assisting cause, and time holds the place of the indispensable cause. [a]

Strictly speaking, a cause is what is able to bring something about by acting. We say that steel is able to cut, and not only while it is cutting but also while it is not. So the power to cause covers both: what is acting now, and what is not yet acting but has it in it to act.

Some say, then, that causes are properties of bodies, and others that they are properties of bodiless things. Others say that a body is a cause in the strict sense, and that what is bodiless is called a cause only loosely, as a kind of quasi-cause. Others reverse this: bodiless things are causes in the strict sense, and bodies only loosely. Cutting, for instance, is an action and is bodiless, and it is the cause of cutting, which is likewise an action and bodiless, and, where bodies are concerned, of being cut — as with the sword and the thing it cuts.

The cause of a thing is spoken of in three ways. First, what the cause is — the sculptor. Second, what it is the cause of coming about — the statue. Third, what it is a cause to — the material; for the sculptor is the cause to the bronze of becoming a statue. Being produced and being cut, which are causes to the things they belong to, are actions, and so are bodiless.

On this principle causes belong to the class of predicates — or, as others say, of things said, since Cleanthes and Archedemus call predicates things said. Or rather, some causes are to be assigned to the class of predicates, like what is cut, whose case is “to be cut”; and some to the class of propositions, like the cause of a ship being built, whose case in turn is “a ship is being built.” Aristotle calls the name of such things — house, ship, burning, cutting — a common noun. But the case is agreed to be bodiless. And that is how this trick of argument is undone. What you say passes through your mouth: true. You say “house.” Therefore a house passes through your mouth: false. For we do not utter the house, which is a body, but the case in which the house is, and that is bodiless.

We say that the house-builder builds the house, with an eye to what is to be produced; and in the same way we say the cloak is woven, since what makes a thing is the mark of the work being done. What makes and what causes are not attributes of two different things but of one and the same thing, in the case of the cloak as in the case of the house. So far as a man is the cause of something being produced, so far he is also its maker. The cause, then, and what makes, and that through which a thing comes about, are the same. If anything is a cause and something that brings an effect about, it is certainly also that through which. But if a thing is that through which, it does not at all follow that it is the cause. Many things come together in one result, and the end is reached through them, and yet they are not all causes.

Medea would not have killed her children if she had not been enraged. She would not have been enraged if she had not been jealous. She would not have been jealous if she had not been in love. She would not have been in love if Jason had not sailed to Colchis. He would not have sailed if the Argo had not been built. The Argo would not have been built if the timber had not been cut on Mount Pelion. In every one of these there is the case of that through which; but they are not all causes of the murder of the children. Only Medea was the cause. And so what does not hinder does not act; and what does not hinder is not a cause, while what hinders is. For a cause is conceived in acting, in doing something.

Besides, what does not hinder stands apart from what happens, while a cause is bound up with the event; so what does not hinder cannot be a cause. The thing comes off, then, simply because what could have hindered it is not there. Causation is spoken of in four ways: the cause that makes, as the sculptor; the material, as the bronze; the form, as the figure stamped on it; and the end, as the honor of the gymnasiarch.

The bronze stands to the making of the statue as an indispensable cause, and it too is a real cause. Everything without which the effect cannot be produced is necessarily a cause — but not a cause without qualification, since an indispensable cause is not a sustaining cause but an assisting one. And everything that acts produces its effect together with the fitness of the thing acted on. The cause disposes it; but each thing is affected according to its own constitution, and this fitness is itself causative and takes the place of an indispensable cause. So the cause has no effect without the fitness; it is then not a cause but a co-agent, since all causation is conceived in acting. Now the earth could not make itself, and so cannot be the cause of itself. And it would be ridiculous to say that the cause of the burning was not the fire but the logs, or that the cause of the cutting was not the sword but the flesh, or that the cause of an athlete’s defeat was not his opponent’s strength but his own weakness.

The sustaining cause needs no time. A hot iron produces pain the instant it is laid on the flesh. Of starting causes, some need time before the effect is produced and some do not, as with a bone breaking. Are these not called independent of time, though, not because time is absent altogether but because there is so little of it — the way we call a thing sudden, and do not mean that it happened outside of time?

Every cause grasped by the mind as a cause is occupied with something and is conceived in relation to something: that is, to some effect, as the sword is to cutting, and to some object that has the fitness for it, as fire is to wood — for fire will not burn steel. A cause belongs among the things that stand in relation to something else, since it is conceived only in its relation to another thing. So we must hold the two together in mind if we are to conceive of a cause as a cause. The same holds for the creator, the maker and the father. A thing is not the cause of itself, and no one is his own father; otherwise the first would become the second. The cause acts and affects; what is produced by the cause is acted on and affected. But one and the same thing taken by itself cannot both act and be affected, any more than one man can be both son and father. And in any case the cause comes first in being before what is done by it, as the sword comes before the cutting; and the same thing cannot at one and the same moment come first, as matter and as cause, and also come after and later, as the effect of a cause.

Being differs from becoming as the cause differs from the effect and the father from the son, for the same thing cannot at the same moment both be and become; and so it is not the cause of itself. Things are not causes of one another, but causes to one another. A disorder of the spleen coming first is not the cause of fever, but of the fever’s occurring; and the fever that comes first is not the cause of the spleen, but of the disorder growing worse. In the same way the virtues are causes to one another, since they answer to each other and cannot be pulled apart. The stones in an arch are causes of its staying an arch, but they are not causes of one another. And the teacher and the learner are causes to one another of what is said of them both — that they are making progress.

Mutual and reciprocal causes are spoken of, sometimes of the same thing — the trader and the shopkeeper are both causes of the profit — and sometimes one of one thing and the other of another, as with the sword and the flesh: the sword is the cause to the flesh of being cut, and the flesh is the cause to the sword of cutting. It is well said, “An eye for an eye, a life for a life.” A man who has wounded another mortally is the cause to him of death, or of death’s occurring. But when he is mortally wounded by that man in return, he has had him as a cause in turn — not in the same respect in which he was a cause to him, but in another. He becomes the cause of death to him, since it was not death that returned the mortal stroke but the wounded man himself. So he was the cause of one thing and had another as his own cause. And the man who has done a wrong becomes a cause to the other, the man wronged. But the law that orders a punishment is not the cause of the injury; it is the cause to the one of retribution and to the other of discipline. So things that are causes are not causes to one another as causes.

It is still asked whether many things joined together become many causes of one thing. The men hauling together are the causes of the ship being drawn down to the water — but along with others, unless what is a joint cause counts as a cause. Others say that if there are many causes, each one by itself becomes the cause of one thing. The virtues, for instance, are many and are causes of happiness, which is one; and in the same way the causes of warmth and of pain are many. But are not the many virtues one in power, and the sources of warmth and of pain likewise? And does not the whole crowd of virtues, being one in kind, become the cause of the one result, happiness?

In truth, though, starting causes are more than one both in kind and in particular: cold, weakness, exhaustion, indigestion and drunkenness are causes of disease in general, and of fever in particular. But sustaining causes are more than one in kind only, and not in particular as well. Of a sweet smell, which is one thing in kind, there are many particular causes — frankincense, rose, saffron, storax, myrrh, scented oil — for the rose does not have the same kind of sweetness as myrrh.

And the same thing becomes the cause of opposite effects, sometimes through the size and force of the cause itself, and sometimes because of what the thing acted on is able to take. Depending on how the force is applied, the same string gives a high note or a low one, according as it is tightened or slackened. Honey is sweet to those who are well and bitter to those in a fever, according to the condition of the ones affected. One and the same wine drives some to rage and others to good cheer. And the same sun melts wax and hardens clay.

Further, of causes some are plain to see, some are grasped by a process of reasoning, some are hidden, and some are worked out by analogy. Of the hidden ones, some are hidden for a time — concealed at one moment and plainly seen at another — and some are hidden by nature and can never at any time be seen. Of those hidden by nature, some can still be grasped, and these some people would not call hidden at all, since they are grasped by analogy through signs: the proportion of the channels of the senses, for example, which is worked out by reason. And some cannot be grasped at all and fall under no apprehension in any way; these are hidden by the very definition of the word.

So some causes are starting causes, some sustaining, some joint causes, some assisting. Some are according to nature and some beyond nature. Some are causes of disease and some accidental; some are causes of sensations, some of how strong the sensations are, and some of times and seasons. When starting causes are taken away, the effect remains. But a sustaining cause is one which, so long as it is present, the effect remains, and when it is taken away, the effect is taken away with it. The sustaining cause is also called by the equivalent name complete in itself, since it is enough by itself to produce the effect.

And if a cause shows an activity sufficient in itself, an assisting cause indicates help and service given along with another. So if it accomplishes nothing, it will not even be called an assisting cause; and if it does accomplish something, it is wholly the cause of that, of what it produces. An assisting cause, then, is one whose presence brought the effect about — the visible ones visibly, the hidden ones invisibly. The joint cause belongs to the class of causes too, in the way that a fellow soldier is a soldier and a fellow youth is a youth. The assisting cause further helps the sustaining cause by intensifying what it produces, but the joint cause does not fall under the same notion; for a thing may be a joint cause without being a sustaining cause, since a joint cause is conceived alongside another that cannot produce the effect by itself — a cause together with a cause. And the assisting cause differs from the joint cause in this: the joint cause produces the effect in something that does not act by itself, while the assisting cause accomplishes nothing by itself, but by coming to what does act by itself it works with it to produce the effect at its fullest strength. Above all, a cause that becomes an assisting cause after having been a starting cause is effective in intensifying the force of the cause.