Still, taking the event as effect, its cause is the antecedent process; or, taking it as a cause, its effect is the consequent process.  This follows from the conception of causation as essentially motion; for that motion takes time is (from the way our perceptive powers grow) an ultimate intuition.  But, for the same reason, there is no interval of time between cause and effect; since all the time is filled up with motion.

Nor must it be supposed that the whole cause is antecedent to the effect as a whole:  for we often take the phenomenon on such a scale that minutes, days, years, ages, may elapse before we consider the cause as exhausted (e.g., an earthquake, a battle, an expansion of credit, natural selection operating on a given variety); and all that time the effect has been accumulating.  But we may further consider such a cause as made up of moments or minute factors, and the effect as made up of corresponding moments; and then the cause, taken in its moments, is antecedent throughout to the effect, taken in its corresponding moments.

(4) The Cause is the invariable antecedent of the effect; that is to say, whenever a given cause occurs it always has the same effect:  in this, in fact, consists the Uniformity of Causation.  Accordingly, not every antecedent of an event is its Cause:  to assume that it is so, is the familiar fallacy of arguing ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc.’  Every event has an infinite number of antecedents that have no ascertainable connection with it:  if a picture falls from the wall in this room, there may have occurred, just previously, an earthquake in New Zealand, an explosion in a Japanese arsenal, a religious riot in India, a political assassination in Russia and a vote of censure in the House of Commons, besides millions of other less noticeable events, between none of which and the falling of the picture can any direct causation be detected; though, no doubt, they are all necessary occurrences in the general world-process, and remotely connected.  The cause, however, was that a door slammed violently in the room above and shook the wall, and that the picture was heavy and the cord old and rotten.  Even if two events invariably occur one after the other, as day follows night, or as the report follows the flash of a gun, they may not be cause and effect, though it is highly probable that they are closely connected by causation; and in each of these two examples the events are co-effects of a common cause, and may be regarded as elements of its total effect.  Still, whilst it is not true that every antecedent, or that every invariable antecedent, of an event is its cause, the cause is conceived of as some change in certain conditions, or some state and process of things, such that should it exactly recur the same event would invariably follow.  If we consider the antecedent state and process of things very widely or very minutely, it never does exactly recur; nor does the consequent.  But the purpose of induction is to get as near the truth as possible within the limits set by our faculties of observation and calculation.  Complex causal instances that are most unlikely to recur as a whole, may be analysed into the laws of their constituent conditions.