Thomas Huxley Quotes

All is bound by the law of causation

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.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

Everything has a cause.

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

I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

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

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

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.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events.

There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future.

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

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.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was

The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.