In book I, Part III, Chapter XIV, of A Treatise of
Human Nature (1739), David Hume, having
proposed
his now famous definitions of “cause,”
stated what he
took to be a corollary of his view. According to Hume,
it should have been clear from the foregoing discussion
that
“all causes are of the same kind....” Part of his
intention in making this statement was to make explicit
his opposition to
the Aristotelian and scholastic doc-
trine of
four kinds or genera of causes. “There is no
foundation,” he went on to say, “for that distinction
... betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material,
... and final
causes”; and he indicated clearly in this
passage that, on his
view, all bona fide causal state-
ments were
about efficient causes. Although the origi-
nality of Hume's discussion of causation has been ac-
knowledged, this contention has not
usually been
singled out for attention. Commentators seem to have
assumed that, in declaring that all causes were of the
same kind, Hume was
simply generalizing a maxim that
antischolastic advocates of the mechanical
or corpus-
cular philosophy had proposed and
followed in their
investigations of nature and that he displayed his origi-
nality in his analysis of the meaning
of the causal terms
used in science and in daily life. Both parts of
this
assumption would be difficult to defend. Among anti-
scholastic and (in Robert Boyle's
inclusive sense of the
term) “corpuscular”
philosophers in the seventeenth
century, there was a wide variety of
reactions to the
traditional doctrine of fourfold causes; and there
was
no agreement, in theory or in practice, that the dis-
covery of efficient causes was the exclusive aim, or
indeed the principal aim, of investigations of nature.
A survey of views
about causal explanation in the
seventeenth century also shows that Hume's
questions
about force and necessary connection had been raised
and
that his own analysis of the meaning of certain
causal expressions had been
proposed. The following
survey, by no means exhaustive, includes some pre-
Newtonian philosophers in England;
Descartes and
some of his followers on the Continent; and the giants
of the
end of the century, Newton and Leibniz.
