From an early period in the machine era a new attitude toward questions of causation comes in evidence in scientific inquiry. The obvious change is perhaps the larger scale on which the sequence of cause and effect is conceived. It is no longer predominantly a question of episodes of causal efficiency, detached and rounded off. Such detail episodes still continue to occupy the routine of investigation; necessarily so, since these empirical sciences proceed step by step in the determination of the phenomena with which they are occupied. But in an increasing degree these detached phenomena are sought to be worked into a theoretical structure of larger scope, and this larger structure of theory falls into shape as a self-determining sequence of cumulative change. The same concept of process that rules in the machine technology invades the speculations of the scientists and results in theories of cumulative sequence, in which the point of departure as well as the objective end of the sequence of causation gradually come to have less and less of a determinative significance for the course of the inquiry and for its results. In theoretical speculations based on the data of the empirical sciences, interest and attention come progressively to centre on this process of cumulative causation, so that the interest in the productive efficiency of consummation ceases gradually to be of decisive moment in the formulations of theory; which comes in this way to be an account of an unfolding process rather than a checking up of individual effects against individual causes. What once were ultimate questions have in modern science become ulterior questions and have lost their preferential place in the inquiry. Neither the seat of efficient initiative, that would be presumed to give this unfolding process of cumulative change its content and direction, nor its eventual goal, wherein it would be presumed to come to rest when the initial impulse has spent itself and its end has been compassed,--neither of these ultimates holds the attention or guides the inquiry of modern science.