Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a product of militant common-sense; and common-sense, in logic as in fiction, has little use for the neutral grays of everyday life; it likes its villains to be real angels of darkness. The fiend in human form who dominates this story is the logician. With a stupidity which quite achieves the level of malice, the logician since the days of Mill has involved every phase of causation in chaos and dark night, until in despair the author had to let in the light himself. The logician can hardly be expected to admit that this portrait is a true likeness, but if he is blessed with a sense of humor, he may be content to leave his revenge to nemesis. Perhaps he will be satisfied when he finds the light-bringer deriving cause from the fact that we cannot imagine a change to be 'produced' without action upon the thing changed (p. 43). While he is struggling to set the bounds to what we can imagine, the logician will perhaps be puzzled to imagine the difference between producing a change and causing one.
The strength of the book lies in the fact that the author conceives the problem of causation in the light of a rather definite situation. As a physician he has been keenly conscious of the ambiguity of such phrases as 'causes of death, ' 'causes of insanity, ' and the serious practical difficulties which the physician faces in reporting upon such 'causes' or in testifying before the courts in cases involving criminal or other responsibility. The value of the book, both to the physician and the logician, would have been enhanced if the chapter on "Causes of Death, Causes of Insanity" had been made more explicitly the center of the discussion rather than a corollary to a theory of causation which professes to be universal. The author does not perceive that the difficulties which he finds in the logicians' treatment of cause arise in the main from their effort to discuss this concept as if it had a single meaning applicable to all situations. The fact is that the uses of causation are so various that any single definition is sure to result in confusion somewhere....
-"The Philosophical Review," Vol. 27 [1918]
