Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause of the new regime in Japan, and the new regime was the cause of the russian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to Perry as the cause of the Douma:  the terms have grown too remote to have any real or practical relation to each other.  In every series of real terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments change, but we change, and their meaning for us changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation continually come into view and appeal to our interest.  Our earlier lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped.  The old terms can no longer be substituted nor the relations ‘transferred,’ because of so many new dimensions into which experience has opened.  Instead of a straight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, one must do violence to its spontaneous development.  Not that one might not possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), find some line in nature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in the same way, might be serially strung without limit, if one’s interest lay in such finding.  Within such lines our axioms might hold, causes might cause their effect’s effects, etc.; but such lines themselves would, if found, only be partial members of a vast natural network, within the other lines of which you could not say, in any sense that a wise man or a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would not be concretely silly, that the principle of skipt intermediaries still held good.  In the practical world, the world whose significances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames of one another; and things constantly cause other things without being held responsible for everything of which those other things are causes.

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heraclitean ’devenir reel,’ ought, if I rightly understand him, positively to deny that in the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification.  Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certain time the very elements of things are no longer what they were, but relations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identical way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones.  If this were really so, then however indefinitely sames might still be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real operations every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease to be traceable any farther.  Sames of the same, in such a world, will not always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same as one another, for in such a world there is no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents.  Nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead of contenting ourselves with Hume’s and Kant’s eviscerated schematism, we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions,[1] that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and that the principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only in abstracto.[2]