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.
Although many philosophers have their own contentions, a good explanation of
causation is hard to derive specifically. There is ultimately always another
reason for each event that occurs rather than the one given. To come to one
event or a few events to determine the actual root of the action is a different
task for everybody. If one event has a direct association and is correlated
quite distinctly with the incident, then one can say it caused the other to
happen. Not only can one say anything caused the other to happen and could
quite possibly be correct with that claim, there must be a strong correlation
between the two events. Without the evidence to relate the two, one can not conclude
anything beyond, what is stated with the facts; no inferences can be taken as a
standard.