Hilary Putnam Quotes

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation.

But a problem occurs about nothing. For that from which something is made is a cause of the thing made from it; and, necessarily,every cause contributes some assistance to the effect's existence.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

All is bound by the law of causation

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

Everything has a cause.

What is meant by cause? Cause is the fine state of the manifested state.

All law has its essence in causation.

It is a law, that every event depends on some law.

We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture.

Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.

But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?

Nothing can be produced without a cause, and the effect is but the cause reproduced.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

Events do not really have beginnings or ends. Behind every event is the previous one, causing, or helping to cause, what follows.

A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.

I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable.