Per se and per accidens ordered series

I’ve never been quite clear on Aquinas’ famous distinction between per se and per accidens ordered series, though I really like the clarity of Ed Feser’s explanation. Abridging greatly:

An instrumental cause is one that derives whatever causal power it has from something else. … [A]ll the causes in [a per se] series other than the first are instrumental [and thus] are said to be ordered per se or “essentially,” for their being causes at all depends essentially on the activity of that which uses them as instruments. By contrast, causes ordered per accidens or “accidentally” do not essentially depend for their efficacy on the activity of earlier causes in the series. To use Aquinas’s example, a father possesses the power to generate sons independently of the activity of his own father … .

The problem here is that it’s really hard to think of any examples of purely instrumental causes in this sense. Take Aquinas’s example of a per se series where the hand moves a stick which moves the stone. That may work in his physics, but not in ours. Every stick is basically a stiff spring—there are no rigid bodies. So, for ease of visualization, let’s imagine a hand that pushes one end of a spring, and the other end of the spring pushes the stone. When you push your end of the spring, the spring compresses a little. A compression wave travels down the spring and the tension in the spring equalizes. The spring is now “charged” with elastic potential energy. And it then pushes on both the hand and the stone by means of the elastic potential energy. There is an unavoidable delay between your pushing your end of the spring and the other end pushing the stone (unavoidable, because physical causation doesn’t exceed the speed of light).

Now, once the spring is compressed, its pushing on the stone is its own causal activity. We can see this as follows. Suppose God annihilated your hand. For a very short while, the other end of the spring wouldn’t notice. It would still be pushing against the stone, and the stone would still be moving. Then the spring would decompress in the direction where the hand used to be, and the stone’s movement would stop. But a very short while is still something—it’s enough to show that the spring is acting on its own. The point isn’t that the stone would gradually slow down. The point, rather, is that it takes a while for the stone’s movement to be at all affected, because otherwise we could have faster-than-light communication between the hand and the spring.

What goes for springs goes for sticks. And I don’t know any better examples. Take Feser’s example in his Five Ways book of a cup held up by a desk which is held up by a floor. Feser says the desk “has no power on its own to hold the cup there. The desk too would fall to the earth unless the floor held it aloft”. Yes, it would—but not instantly. If the floor were to disappear, the tension in the desk’s legs—which, again, are just stiff springs—would continue to press upward on the desktop, which would press upward on the cup, counteracting gravity. But then because the bottoms of the legs are unsupported, the tension in the legs would relax, the legs would imperceptibly lengthen, and the whole thing would start to fall. Still, for a short while the top of the desk would have been utterly unaffected by the disappearance of the floor. It would only start accelerating downward once the tension in the legs dissipatated. It takes a time of at least L/c, where L is the length of the legs and c is the speed of light, for that to happen. Again, the legs of the table are charged-up springs whose internal tension is holding up the desktop.

If this is right, then we don’t have any clear examples of the kind of purely instrumental causality that Feser—and, fairly likely, Aquinas—is talking about. Now, it may be that the deep metaphysics of causation is indeed such that indeed all creaturely causation is indeed of this instrumental sort, being the instrument of the first cause. But since Aquinas is using the idea of per se causal series to establish the existence of the first cause, we need an argument here that does not depend on the existence of the first cause.