§ 6. As might be expected of a postulate so obviously originated by our practical needs, the concept of cause on examination reveals its anthropomorphic character. This is particularly obvious when we consider the concept of Causation as it figures in everyday unscientific thought. The various scientific substitutes for the popular notion of cause all exhibit traces of the endeavour to purge the conception of its more anthropomorphic elements. In the popular use of the concept this anthropomorphism comes out most strikingly in two ways. (_a_) A cause, as popularly conceived, is always a person or thing, _i.e._ something we can imagine as a whole, and into which we can mentally project a conscious life akin to our own. To the scientific mind it seems obvious that causes and effects are alike _events_ and events only, but for popular thought, while the effect is always a quality or state (_e.g._, death, fever, etc.), the cause is regularly a thing or person (the bullet, the poison, the tropical sun, etc.). (_b_) Closely connected with this is the emphasis popular thought lays upon what it calls the _activity_ of the cause. The cause is never thought of as merely preceding the effect as an “inseparable antecedent”; it is supposed to _make_ the effect occur, to bring it about by an exercise of activity. According to the most coherent expositions of this type of thought, in causation one thing is always _active_ in producing a change in another thing which is _passive_. The origin of this notion is sufficiently obvious. As all philosophers since Hume have recognised, the “activity” of the cause results from the ascription to it of the characteristic feeling of self-assertion and self-expansion which accompanies our own voluntary interference in the course of events. Similarly, the “passivity” of the thing in which the effect is produced is only another name for the feeling of coercion and thwarted self-assertion which arises in us when the course of nature or the behaviour of our fellows represses our voluntary execution of our designs.