what
we _mean_ by working, though we may later come to learn that working
was not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our
intention--this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape
in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it
anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention,
here is causality at work.[101] To treat this offhand as the bare
illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable
ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more
empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain
your given fact by your 'principle,' but the principle itself, when
you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little
spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact
your mind, considering causality, can never get.[102]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature,
as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it to
be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal.
We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the healthy
thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what
effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the
concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of
which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more
remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed
to the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears.
If we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in
itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to recognize
an actual cause when we had one, and so to track the future course of
operations more intelligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into
causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry
equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything
else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of the world as well as in the
absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the
world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be
they the conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic
outcome in the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession
stages which the elements work out.