Abstract

§ 21. Until a few years ago the hope of the physicist seems on the whole to have been that he would eventually be able to exhibit a single interconnected system of perfectly deterministic causal laws. He took the relation of cause and effect in all change to be such that from a determinate antecedent state of that which changes there must necessarily follow a different subsequent state of it, and it was assumed by him that complete knowledge of the antecedent state must enable exact prediction of the subsequent state. I do not think it matters here whether that which changes was taken as a limited subject of change or as the whole physical world.