This widely-known philosophical triad of concepts — ends, causes, and effects - is used spiritually by Swedenborg to express a pattern that is behind everything that we do.

An "end" is a love, desire, or affection that motivates us. A "cause" is the knowledge or skill that we can use to accomplish this "end." An "effect" is the action we take that brings completion. In other words, when we are motivated by a goal (an end), and have the knowledge necessary to accomplish it (the cause), the goal will be achieved (the effect).

These motivations don't have to be grandiose. The end also may not always describe something we really want; it may be that we want to avoid the consequences of not doing it, e.g. getting scolded or losing our job. But regardless of whether the end is positive or negative, every action has some kind of motivating desire. Consequently, these three words can explain why and how we do anything.

On a spiritual level, it works the same way. We love things (ends), and we know truths (causes). We act on our loves, using our truths (or false ideas, if that's what we've cultivated), and those acts are effects.

(Riferimenti: Arcana Coelestia 1318, 5608, 5711-5726; Divine Providence 108)

108. These comparisons enable us to see how everything in our volition and discernment, everything in our mind, is united to our life's love, but they do not enable us to see this rationally. We can see the union rationally as follows. There are always three things that make up a unity, namely, purpose, means, and result. The life's love is the purpose; the desires and their perceptions are the means; and the pleasures of those desires and their thoughts are the results. This is because just as a purpose attains its result through means, love attains its pleasures through desires and reaches into thoughts through perceptions.

The actual effects occur in the mind's pleasures and their thoughts when the pleasures come from our volition and the thoughts come from the resulting discernment; that is, when there is complete agreement between them. The results are then part of our spirit; and even if they do not come out in physical action, they are virtually in action when this agreement is reached. They are in our bodies as well and are dwelling there with our life's love, eager to act; and they act whenever nothing prevents it. This is what cravings for evil and actual evils are like for people who in their spirit regard them as permissible.

[2] Just as a purpose unites with its means and through its means with a result, then, our life's love unites with the inner processes of our thought and through them with its outer processes. We can therefore see that the quality of the outer processes of our thinking is essentially the same as the quality of the inner ones, since a purpose instills itself completely into its means and through its means into its result. Nothing essential happens in the result except what is in the means and what lies behind the means in the purpose; and since the purpose is therefore the very essence that fills the means and the result, we refer to the means and the result as the intermediate purpose and the final purpose.