Thomas Brown's Theory of Causation

Abstract

Thomas Brown's Theory of Causation JOHN A. MILLS Thomas Brown (1778--1820) has an ambiguous place in the history of philosophy.' It is natural to classify him among the Scottish common sense philosophers and yet he does not belong in that category because his position , in many important respects, differed sharply from that of Thomas Reid, the most important member of the school. He could be called an empiricist, but then one would have to be careful to distinguish him from the associationists, who are usually treated as the empiricists par excellence. In assessing his role in intellectual history he cannot be treated solely as a philosopher because he wrote eight w)lumes of verse, six of which were published while he shared the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh with l)ugald Stewart. Finally, we have to ask whether Brown contributed any thoughts of his own to the history of thought or whether he did no more than produce a pastiche based entirely on the work of others: Although the present paper is concerned with Brown's theory of causation , it is necessary, before dealing with his theory in detail, to discuss the relationship between his solution to the problem of cause and effect and the way he solved other philosophical problems. From 18o6 onwards Brown was deeply concerned to show that metaphysics, like the physical sciences, was a ' I)r. George Davie and MI. Michael Barfoot gave me a great deal of hell.) in tile research which resulted in the present paper, and Mr. Michael Pakaluk made invaluable comments on tire first draft. 1 am deeply grateful to all of them. "File research was carried out while I field a I.eave Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research ('ouncil of Canada. A preliminary version of the paper was read to the Scottish Philosophy Seminar at tire University of Edinburgh in January 198e. ' That criticism is to be found m the article on Brown in James McCosh, The ScotO.~h Phtlowphy, Biograph,cal, Exposttory, C1iOcal,from Hutche.~on to Hamzlton (I.ondon: Macmillan, t875) and in Sir William I lamilton's review of Oeuvres Completes de Thomas Re,d, Chef de l'Ecole Ecossm.*, ed. Th..louffroy m Edinburgh Remea, 5:2 (183o- 3 lo): , 58-~o 7 (reprinted in Hamilton's Dtscmstons on Phdo.~ophy and L,telature, EducaOon and Umver~tty Re]o~m New York: Harper and Bros., ,858). [207] 208 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHV ~2:2 APR 1984 subject in which genuine discoveries could be made. The rules governing the search of knowledge and which guaranteed the genuineness of that knowledge once it had been attained had to be equally applicable to both, he believed. He also held that scientific and metaphysical practice resembled each other in another way. In both, he assumed without question that discovery consisted of recording the temporal relationships between events and of the use of various techniques of analysis in order to describe the ultimate constituents of substances. A complete compendium of knowledge, then, would consist of a record of all the invariable successions that actually occur in the universe. Since Brown held that causation is nothing other than the occurrence of invariable successions, the central role of that concept in all his thinking is obvious. In stressing the close relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy Brown was not setting himself apart from other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. One aspect of his thought that clearly differentiates him from them is his monism. At first sight he does not seem to be a monist because, right from the time he started to develop his philosophy seriously, he asserted that neither the physical nor the mental realm had any primacy over the other. So we are, I think, obliged to call him a methodological monist. In order to understand what is meant by that term, it is necessary to bear in mind that Brown believed that the same causal principles operate in both the physical and the mental universes. Because those principles operate in different media and because of the limitations of the process of introspective analysis (the only procedure available, so Brown believed) in the...