Introduction
My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topicofcausality.
I
didn'tknow that what 1 was interested in belonged to philosophy. As a result of myteen-age conversion to the Catholic Church -itself the fruit ofreading donefrom twelve to fifteen
-
read a work called
Natural
Theology
by a nineteenth-century Jesuit. I read
it
with great appetite and found
it
all convincing exceptfor two things. One was the doctrine of
scientia media,
according to whichGod knew what anybody would have done if, e.g., he hadn't died when hedid. This was a part of theodicy, and was also the form in which the problemof counter-factual conditionals was discussed.
I
found
I
could not believethis doctrine:
it
appeared to me that there was not, quite generally, any suchthing as what would have happened if what did happen had not happened,and that in particular there was no such thing, generally speaking, as whatsomeone would have done if.
. .
and certainly that there was no such thingas how someone would have spent his life if he had not died a child.
I
did notknow at the time that the matter was one of fierce dispute between the Jesuitsand the Dominicans, who took rather my own line about it. So when I wasbeing instructed a couple of years later by a Dominican at Oxford, FrRichard Kehoe, and he asked me if
I
had any difficulties,
I
told him that Icouldn't see how that stuff could be true. He was obviously amused and toldme that 1 certainly didn't have to believe it, though I only learned thehistorical fact
I
have mentioned rather later.But
it
was the other stumbling block that got me into philosophy. Thebook contained an argument for the existence of a First Cause, and as a pre-liminary to this
it
offered a proofofsome 'principle of causality'according towhich anything that comes about must have a cause. The proof had the faultof proceeding from a barely concealed assumption of its own conclusion.
I
thought that this was some sort of carelessness on the part of the author, andthat
it
just needed tidying up. So
I
started writing improved versions of it;each one satisfied me for a time, but then reflection would show me that Ihad committed the same fault. I don't think
I
ever showed my efforts toanyone;
I
tore them up when I found they were no good, and I went roundasking people
why,
if something happened, they would be sure
it
had a cause.No one had an answer to this. In two or three years of effort I produced fiveversions of a would-be proof, each one of which I then found guilty of thesame error, though each time it was more cunningly concealed. In all thistime I had no philosophical teaching about the matter; even my last attemptwas made before I started reading Greats at Oxford. It was not until thenthat
I
read Hume and the discussion in Aquinas, where he says that it isn'tpart of the concept of
being
to include any relation to a cause. But 1could notunderstand the grounds of his further claim, that it
is
part of the concept of
coming into being.
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