The French philosopher and mathematician Ren Descartes and his school made cause the same with substance. The physical scientists quite frequently had a mechanical view of causality, bringing cause to a motion or change followed by other motion. The British philosopher David Hume carried to a logical conclusion the contention of Sextus Empiricus that causality is not a real relation, but a fiction of the mind. To take in account for the origin of this fiction Hume used the doctrine of association. Hume's explanation of cause led the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to hypothesize cause as a fundamental category of understanding. Kant stated that the only predictable objective world is the product of a synthetic activity of the mind. In addition, Kant decided that causality is one of the principles of coherence obtaining in the world of phenomena, and that it is universally present there because thought, as part of its contribution to the nature of that world, always puts it there.......
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