Abstract

The nineteenth-century British philosopher William Hamilton defended his law of the conditioned in part on the strength of its ability to offer a satisfactory theory of causation. He maintained that our belief that every event is the outcome of some cause and the source of some further effect finds its ground, not in the world, but rather in the limitations of our own minds; specifically in our inability to conceive of either absolute commencement of being or its absolute annihilation. While radically unlike modern conceptions of causality, Hamilton's account is better able to defend itself than either its critics or its neglect might suggest, while its modest and negative formulation recommends it to those of a sceptical tendency