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LET us SUPPOSE that a man has been run down by a lorry while crossing a London street. The question of course arises, what was the cause of the event? It may be answered that it was commonly known to be a dangerous corner; or that the man was shortsighted; or that he was a dreamer, inclined to jaywalking; or that it was a foggy evening, and the driver did not see him. These are all perfectly good uses of the word cause, and moreover they could all have been true in this case. But how shall it be decided which (if any) was the cause of the accident? The answer is, it cannot. We are left with a list of possible or "contributory" causes (and there could be more), but there are no known rules by which to arrange them in order of priority.
This situation is common enough, and it does not normally provoke philosophical questionings, though in a way it ought to; for it means we shall never be able, even in theory, to discover the cause of that accident. We have to accept defeat, and it will not, nor should it, discourage us from asking the same question, with better hope, on another occasion. What it tells us is that cause is an ordinary word; it is a valuable part of our vocabulary, but it has no proper place in science or philosophy. William James, in his essay "The Dilemma of Determinism," makes the rather good remark that the principle of causality is as much an altar to the unknown God as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. James was onto something.
For one thing, and this is important, the assertion of a cause is always in the nature of a conjecture. It consists in suggesting a connection between an event or state of affairs and something belonging to a different sphere of existence. (In this way a cause is different from a reason, a point that I shall come to.) What-someone might ask-is the cause of an increase in crime? It may be answered that it is drink, or lack of early discipline, or the affluent society: very different sorts of things. When Mrs. Sowerby, in Oliver Twist,...