Condition

CONDITION. - A very vague term, usually used in relation to that of cause (v.). While the cause has a positive influence in the production of the effect, the c., on the other hand, represents what is required for the cause to be able to exercise its influence or for the effect to be able to receive it. Percussion bombs must encounter something hard in order to explode: the percussion of a hard resistant body is only a c. of the explosion, whose true cause is the ignition that the percussion provokes in the explosive materials; if this is provoked by another route (a rise in temperature, for example), the explosion occurs just the same. It is called a c. "sine qua non" when its presence is "indispensable": then its distinction from the cause as such is not always easy in concrete terms.

One speaks of a c. in every process of becoming, natural, artificial and supernatural: the alteration of qualities is a c. of every corruption; preparation is a c. of every work of art; multiple c., on the part of the matter, the subject, the minister, are required in the administration of the Sacraments. Often, therefore, c. comes close to the meaning of "disposition." According to the phenomenalists, the c. is distinguished from the cause only as the part from the whole, since the cause is the complex of antecedents required for the arising of the new phenomenon (W. Schuppe, Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik, Berlin 1894, p. 73).

Cornelio Fabro