It is fortunate all will come right in Heaven, for it is certain too much goes wrong on Earth. If once we pushed on to the coast and separated, we should never be able to see that place again with our eyes, or do any more than sinners did with Heaven—wish themselves there, but know they can never come at it. If man were wholly made in Heaven, why catch we hell-glimpses? Aging is a reality that comes to all. It represents the accumulated continuity of time and living. Though aging comes to all, it is not the same for all. It is subtle, varied, mixed. Senility is a reality that comes to some. It symbolizes the most exaggerated pain of the oldness that can come with aging. It is all too obvious, all too limiting, all too tragically pathetic. To be aged is to have to face the prospect of possibly being senile. A  man, lay in his son’s bed. His life had grown deeply disturbing: unrelieved agony, constant confusion—he could not even remember who he was. The indignity of utter helplessness, and the aggravation of aggressive concern after recently fathering a child, when he could not be trusted to take care of anything.   #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

In an especially poignant episode, his former wife found him crawling around in his son’s bed agitatedly searching among the covers. When asked what he wanted, he replied, “I’m looking for my lost self!” Until recently, aging loomed as forebodingly as death, while some people get plastic surgery to remain youthful, some get it to convince themselves that they are not aging. A conspiracy of silence iron-curtained the elderly, the infirmed, the senile. When people forget who they are or what day it is, it can be a wretched and despairing situation. With the experience of again, an open life imperceptibly merges into a limited life. Whereas there is a time when there are few if any boundaries, there comes a time when there is nothing but boundaries. Abilities go; memory decays; what one has worked so hard to create is labor lost; the end is as though there had been no beginning. Even so, however, limited and exiled in the present, the antiquated person still remains the person he or she was, even if they cannot remember who they are. Clearly, aging is a developmental process within the limits of finitude. As #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Aeneas and the Sibyl watched from above, they pursued their way back to Earth, he said to her, “Whether thou be a goddess or a mortal beloved of the gods, by me thou shalt always be held in reverence. When I reach the upper air, I will cause a temple to be built in thy honor, and will myself bring offerings.” “I am no goddess,” said the Sibyl; “I have no claim to sacrifice or offering. I am mortal; yet if I could have accepted the love of Apollo, I might have been immortal. He promised me the fulfilment of my wish, if I would consent to be his. I took a handful of sand and, holding it forth, said, ‘Grant me to see as many birthdays as there are sand grains in my hand.’ Unluckily I forgot to ask for enduring youth. This also he would have granted, could I have accepted his love, but offended at my refusal, he allowed me to grow old. My youth and youthful strength fled long ago. I have lived seven hundred years, and to equal the number of the sand grains, I have still to see three hundred springs and three hundred harvests. My body shrinks up as years increase, and in time I shall be lost to sight, but my voice will remain, and future ages will respect my scriptures.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Through the years theories as to what constitutes successful aging have varied. These concluding words of the sibyl alluded to her prophetic power. In her cave she was accustomed to inscribe on leaves gathered from the trees the names and fates of individuals. The leaves thus inscribed were arranged in order within the cave, and might be consulted by her votaries. However, if perchance at the opening of the doors the wind rushed in and dispersed the leaves, the Sibyl gave no assistance to restoring them again, and the oracle was irreparably lost. The doctrine of the uniformity of causation is relatively recent in philosophy and arose, more or less, with the development and growth of science and its increasing emphasis upon laws of nature. Of course, philosophers have always been aware of certain uniformaities of nature, but there was little emphasis upon the absolute uniformity of causation before the rise of experimental science. There seemed, moreover, to be certain causes—such as the Sun, for instance—whose effects were so numerous and diverse that there appeared to be almost no similarity between them at all. It was at first thought that causes produced their effects by virtue of their power or efficacy to do so. (Such is, in fact, part of the original meaning of an efficient cause.)  #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

This easily gave rise to the idea that a cause must be at least as great as its effect, that the lesser cannot produce the greater, a claim that was made, and considered self-evident. The supposition that a given kind of cause could have but one kind of effect was seldom considered obvious, however. The following legend of the Sibyl is fixed at a later date. In the region of one of the Tarquins there appeared before the king a woman who offered him nine books for sale. The king refused to purchase them, whereupon the woman went away and burned three of the books, and returning, offered the remaining books for the same price she had asked for the nine. The king again rejected them; but when the woman, after burning three books more, returned and asked for the three remaining the same price which she had asked for the nine, his curiosity was excited, and he purchased the books. They were found to contain the destinies of the Roman state. They were kept in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, preserved in a stone chest, and allowed to be inspected only by especial officers appointed for that duty, who on great occasions consulted them and interpreted their oracles to the people. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

There were various Sibyls; but the Cumaean Sibyl, of whom Ovid and Virgil write, is the most celebrated of them. Ovid’s story of her life protracted to one thousand years may be intended to represent the various Sibyls as being only reappearances of one and the same individual. Young, in the Night Thoughts, alludes to the Sibyl. Speaking of Worldly Wisdom, he says: If future fate she plans, ‘tis all in leaves, like Sibyl, unsubstantial, fleeting bliss; at first blast it vanishes in air. As Worldly schemes resemble Sibyl’s leaves, the good man’s days to Sibyl’s books compare, the price still rising as in number less. We need to learn this secret of the burning heart. Suddenly the divine appears to us, fires are set ablaze, and we are given wonderful visons; but then we must learn to maintain the secret of the burning heart—a heart that can go through anything. It is the simple, dreary day, with its commonplace duties and people, that smothers the burning heart—unless we have learned the secret of abiding in God. Never deceive yourself; when carnality has gone you will know it—it is the most real thing you can imagine. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

An example of cause as power is a sculptor, who has not only the physical equipment but also the power or ability to convert marble to a statue.  Lacking either, he or she could not make a statue. The Sun, similarly, has the power to make things grow and the power to do all the other things it does. It was in terms of this concept that God was thought of as the cause of the World, and accordingly, as being a being who is all-powerful. Bishop Berkeley considers it so obvious that a cause cannot be thought of apart from the idea of power that he used this as an important argument to prove that our “ideas” (sensations) cannot be caused either by matter or by other ideas, both being, as he put it, “inert” or passive and, hence, lacking the power to produce anything. A human’s ideas must accordingly, he thought, be caused by some “active” being or, literally, an agent, such as himself or herself or God. Prior to John Locke and the rise of empiricism, the very movements of people and animals were thought to be the expressions of the power of such creatures over their own bodies.  Aristotle accordingly described animals as “self-moved.”  #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

When philosophers finally addressed themselves to the understanding of the concept of power within the framework of empiricist presuppositions they became involved, of course, in enormous difficulties since this idea does not seem to correspond to any idea either of sensation or “reflection” (introspection) or to be analyzable in terms of such ideas. Many writers have suggested that it is derived from the feeling or effort or will that is involved in voluntary action. Causes and effects are merely changes that we find constantly conjoined. We should not, explain changes in terms of causes having the power to produce them. We should instead simply note that certain changes are, in fact, found to be invariably conjoined with others. It is only because we find such uniformities and thereby come to expect them that we come to speak of power in the first place. Very many philosophers have believed that this idea is essentially right, at least with respect to the elimination of the idea of power from the concept of causation, and in fact, the association is seldom referred to any more in philosophical literature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

A noteworthy exception to the resolution is the idea that active power of a cause is everywhere presupposed in any description of deliberate and voluntary human behavior, even though no philosopher can define this concept in terms of any others. Causation of voluntary actions by an agent is, moreover, the paradigm example of causation, and the relations between the states and changes of inanimate things can be called “causal” only in a loose and metaphorical sense. There has recently been an increasing tendency in philosophy, particularly in philosophical psychology and in discussion of the will, to defend similar views. Human beings, and perhaps other animals, are claimed by an increasing number of philosophers to be the causes of certain of the motions of their own bodies in a way that uniquely distinguishes them as “agents,” or beings who act and are thus possessed of what is called “active power.” Such a view has the effect of rendering quite irreducible the difference between human behavior of inanimate things, and it is accordingly almost universally rejected in experimental psychology. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There is a certain necessary or inherent connection between any cause and its effect. By this s meant that the joint occurrence of both is not “accidental”—that cause is something which is such that, once given, its effect—that the effect must happen in case the cause exists. These are all ways of saying essentially the same thing. If the Sun shines upon a rock under certain conditions, for example, then it is not merely true that the rock becomes warm; it must become warm, these two states being so related that one cannot fail to occur if the other occurs. Similarly, if a man insults another, it is not merely true that the insulted man becomes angry; he cannot, normally, help becoming angry, or, in other words, the insult makes him angry. Therefore, it is possible that there is, in fact, no such necessary connection between any cause and its effect. Just as the idea of power cannot be traced to any sense experience and hence must, in case we have any such idea at all, be the fabrication of our own minds, so also the idea of any cause is perfectly separable in our minds from its effect; that is, we can easily, and without any absurdity or contradiction, imagine any cause whatever without its accustomed effect which is, in fact, never accompanies it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

There is no contradiction, for example, in affirming that water solidifies instead of boiling when heated, that a man thrives instead of suffocating under water, or that when a rolling ball strikes another of the same weight, it simply stops or both move on together, instead of the first stopping and the other moving. We learn from experience that such things do not happen. There is, accordingly, no necessary connection between a cause and its effect. Anything might cause anything. For the same reason, no one can ever infer any effect simply from a description of a cause. Experience alone teaches us what follows upon what, and this is all that is teaches us. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between they. They seem conjoined, but never connected. The Sibyl should have asked Aeneas to extend her life and for every lasting youth. The mistake is people have an idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect or this idea was part of what people mean by a causal connection. No connections exist between causes themselves and their effects. The idea of a necessary connection to certain habits of expectation is traced to our minds. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

That is to say, people become accustomed to finding certain changes more or less constantly conjoined with others—for example, finding certain experiences, such as putting one’s finger into a flame, followed by pain—and the association thus established in human’s minds lead to a habitual expectation of certain impending events upon the experiencing of others. It is this habit of expectations or customary transition of the imagination that the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect has been traced. What his means, of course, is that the necessary connections between causes and their effects are read into our experiences or imputed to causes and effects when in fact no such connection exists. Aeneas, having parted from the Sibyl and rejoined his fleet, coasted along the shores of Italy and cast anchor in the mouths of the Tiber. The poet, having brought his hero to this spot, the destined termination of his wanderings, invokes his Muse to tell him the situation of things at the eventful moment. Philosophers who one spoke so freely of causes as things having the power to compel the occurrences of effects always took for granted that the power or efficacy of a cause never extends to things past or that causes cannot occur after their effect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

This priority of a cause to its effect was, moreover, considered to be a metaphysical necessity and not a mere convention of speech. It was generally assumed that nothing past is within the power of anything. Things past are unalterable; they are and mist forever remain whatever they have been. Things present, on the other hand, are sometimes alterable. They can be changed in numerous ways, depending upon what causes act upon them. Contemporary philosophers, who have been wanted to insist that the casual relation can be analyzed without invoking any idea of power, have nevertheless, for the most part, agreed that causes cannot occur after their effects. However, this is generally considered to be not a metaphysical truth depending n the efficacy of causes but simply a consequence of customary linguistic usage. That is, it is generally thought to be simply part of the usual meaning of cause that a cause is something temporally prior to, or at least not subsequent to, its effect. The way to Heaven out of all places is of like length and distance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13