Cause – Effect – Ground – Power.

Abstract

I continue to track down the first source of our knowledge of things, although I am in danger of tiring you out with intricacies. But if one wants to escape the snares of sophism, at least once in one’s life one has to work meticulously through all sorts of subtleties and make them clear. We have seen that the very frequent succession of one appearance upon another provides us with the grounded supposition that they stand in some connection with one another. We call the foregoing appearance the cause, the subsequent appearance the effect, and are convinced that they can both be combined in a logical proposition. That is to say, in the concept of the cause as subject, something will necessarily be found, on the basis of which the effect can be conceived as [its] predicate. This something or the characteristic in the cause, from which the effect may be inferred, we call the ground and say: every effect is grounded in its cause. With the same grounds of the truth, we conclude from two appearances accompanying one another, that they must be subject to a third, common cause, without deciding whether they are immediately or mediately subject to it.