The Chain and the Falling Stone
There is in us, perhaps, a modest but stubborn habit: to tie a ribbon around the world and call the knot an explanation. We see a thing happen, we hear a cry in the night, we witness an act, and at once we judge and assign a cause to its effect, or several causes, neatly arranged, as though life were obliged to present itself in tidy parcels. This black-and-white confidence, this almost innocent readiness to say why, has its ancestry in old Humean observation [natural causality is universal]—in the persuasion that natural causality is everywhere and admits of no holiday. If a lion hunts and kills a zebra to eat, we say simply: it is because the lion was hungry, or it is in the nature of the lion to hunt and eat. But what, then, made the lion hungry? It is here, I think, that our curiosity ought properly to begin. For if every event in nature has a prior cause, then that prior cause, being itself an event, must also have something standing behind it, and behind that something yet an...