Nor can the difficulty be escaped by taking refuge in the continuity of the stream of events. For (1) as we have seen, the recognition of events as continuous processes necessarily leads to the surrender of the causal principle as inadequate to express the real connection of facts. Causality, as a special form of the category of Ground and Consequence, must stand or fall with the view of occurrences as sequences of discontinuous events. And (2) even apart from this consideration, the appeal to continuity can at best only be worked as a rejoinder to the internal analysis of a sequence into an infinite process. When it is urged that, on the causal principle, there must be an infinite number of intermediate stages between the cause and the effect in any given case, it is possible to retort that the stages are not “really” distinct, but only distinguished by an artificial abstraction, that the process is actually one and continuous, and therefore does not involve an infinite regress, except for the logician who erroneously construes it as discontinuous. But with the external regress _in indefinitum_ you cannot deal in this way. The absence of a beginning follows as necessarily from the principle of explaining the later stages of a continuous process as conditioned by the earlier, as it does when the stages are taken to be distinct events. (This is easily seen from the simple consideration that the time-variable in your formula for the successive stages of the process may have an unlimited range of possible values from -[infinity] to +[infinity].) In short, whether the succession of events be taken as continuous or not, the attempt to translate the axiom that whatever happens has its ground in the nature of the whole system to which it belongs, into the doctrine that the posterior in time is completely determined by and dependent on the prior, leads straight to the infinite regress. And, as we said in our last chapter, the occurrence of the infinite regress is always a sign that there is imperfection somewhere in the thought which sets it up. For it always implies the formal contradiction of the actual summation by successive increments of an infinite series. Further considerations on this point may be deferred till we come to treat of the continuity of time.[112]