Abstract

The following study takes, for its starting point, an examination of Hume's doctrine of causation and the manner in which his reconstruction of the causal nexus made it possible for him to transform the direction of eighteenth century thought. Indeed, for Hume's predecessors, having subsumed the empirical relation of cause and effect under the metaphysical categories of substance and accident, it followed that the effect had to be construed as a permanent property or quality of its cause, capable of being derived from it through a process of analysis. Accordingly, it was inconceivable that an effect could be greater than its cause, since this would be tantamount to assigning the category of accident more "perfection" than that of substance, or, in other words, it would be assuming that that which has a lesser degree of "reality" can give rise to that which has a greater degree of reality without having a qualitatively distinct element externally added to it. The traditional construction of the causal principle thus militated against the emergence of a doctrine of evolution, insofar as that notion presupposes that greater complexity and organization is characteristic, not of that which is original or antecedent, but of that which is later or resultant in the order of time. ;For Hume, however, having shown that the causal principle may be denied without contradiction, it followed that the relation between cause and effect was not one of formal implication, but only one of empirical sequence. Hence, he concluded, to the extent that experience indicates the regular and constant generation of higher forms from lower ones, then it may be inferred that the ideal is not the precondition of the material but rather its most fully developed mode of existence. This view formed the basis of the new evolutionary perspective, with devastating consequences to the received theology