What are some examples of inmanent causes and effects in everyday nature?

Question

Reading Spinoza's Ethics I find myself fascinated by the distinction bewteen inmanent cause and transitive cause.

In the Ethics comes like so:

E1 PROP. 18. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

As I understand it, a transitive cause is one which its effect transcends the cause itself. The sun can be a transitive cause of my sunburn: even though there is no sun anymore, my burn remains.

A immanent cause is one which its effect cannot trascend the cause. The effect exists inside the cause and cannot outlive it; the effect exists as long as the cause does.

I read somewhere that an example of an inmanent cause is fire (as the cause) and light (as the effect). When the cause fire stops existing, so does the effect light.

What are some other examples of such inmanent causes and effects that we can find in everyday nature?

Answer 1

What Spinoza is calling an indwelling cause is what modern language calls the underlying structure that gives rise to an epiphenomenon. A running computer application is an epiphenomenon of your computer hardware in its particular configuration and power state. Both the computer application and the computer hardware are epiphenomena of Spinoza's impersonal God, who should not be confused with the God of Christianity or other major religions. See: SEP:

since God has all possible attributes, then the attribute to be possessed by this second substance would be one of the attributes already possessed by God. But it has already been established that no two substances can have the same attribute. Therefore, there can be, besides God, no such second substance.

Immanence is the related religious concept that the divine is present in part or all of nature. The adjective immanent can only describe gods or other supernatural beings.

Transience is temporariness. A transient cause is one that happens and is over, i.e., God creates the sun and the moon to light day and night, and they get on to lighting it without further influence from God.

Transitivity is a property of verbs or mathematical relationships. There are no transitive causes (nouns). All causings (verbs) are transitive in the grammatical sense, since cause requires a direct object: "God caused the rainstorm" means something; "God caused" begs the question "caused what?" There's no relation to transience except that they share etymological roots.