"All
effects follow not with like certainty from their supposed causes." (David
Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions." (David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature." (David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses. The mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects: consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion." (David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", 1748)
"[…]
chance, that is, an infinite number of events, with respect to which our
ignorance will not permit us to perceive their causes, and the chain that
connects them together. Now, this chance has a greater share in our education
than is imagined. It is this that places certain objects before us and, in
consequence of this, occasions more happy ideas, and sometimes leads us to the
greatest discoveries […]" (Claude Adrien Helvetius, "On Mind",
1751)
"[...] for no more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause." (Jean J Rousseau, "The Social Contract", 1762)
"The art of discovering the causes of phenomena,
or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious
conjecture greatly shortens the road." (Gottfried W Leibniz, "New
Essays Concerning Human Understanding", 1704) [published 1765]
"One
of the most intimate of all associations in the human mind is that of cause and
effect. They suggest one another with the utmost readiness upon all occasions;
so that it is almost impossible to contemplate the one, without having some
idea of, or forming some conjecture about the other." (Joseph Priestley,
"The History and Present State of Electricity", 1767)
"To endeavor at discovering the connections that subsist in nature, is no way inconsistent with prudence; but it is downright folly to push these researches too far; as it is the lot only of superior Beings to see the dependence of events, from one end to the other, of the chain which supports them." (Pierre Louis Maupertuis, "An Essay Towards a History of the Principal Comets Since 1742", 1769)
"But
ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well
as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents
our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus
there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and
we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining
their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of
the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories,
the science of chance or probability." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, "Recherches, 1º, sur
l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur
Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards", 1773)
"If an
event can be produced by a number n of different causes, the probabilities of
the existence of these causes, given the event (prises de l'événement), are to
each other as the probabilities of the event, given the causes: and the
probability of each cause is equal to the probability of the event, given that
cause, divided by the sum of all the probabilities of the event, given each of
the causes.” (Pierre-Simon
Laplace, "Mémoire sur la Probabilité des Causes par les Événements",
1774)
"The
word ‘chance’ then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena
that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order.
Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our
knowledge.” (Pierre-Simon
Laplace, "Mémoire sur les Approximations des Formules qui sont Fonctions de
Très Grands Nombres", 1783)
"The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules." (Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Active Powers of Man", 1785)
"Pure mathematics can never deal with the possibility, that is to say, with the possibility of an intuition answering to the conceptions of the things. Hence it cannot touch the question of cause and effect, and consequently, all the finality there observed must always be regarded simply as formal, and never as a physical end." (Immanuel Kant, "The Critique of Judgement", 1790)
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