ABSTRACT
The connection between causation and necessity was reinforced. And this has been the general characteristic of those who have sought to oppose David Hume's conception of causality. It is often declared or evidently assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connection, or alternatively, that being caused is—nontrivially—in stancing some exceptionless generalization saying that such an event always follows such antecedents. The truth of physical indeterminism is thus indispensable if people are to make anything of the claim to freedom. But certainly it is insufficient. The physically undetermined is not thereby 'free'. For freedom at least involves the power of acting according to an idea, and no such thing is ascribed to whatever is the subject of unpredetermination in indeterministic physics. It was natural that when physics went indeterministic, some thinkers should have seized on this indeterminism as being just what was wanted for defending the freedom of the will.
