ABSTRACT
THE previous chapter was devoted to a general discussion of causality and chance. We shall now proceed to show in some detail how these categories manifest themselves in classical physics (which is roughly that branch of physics that had its fundamental development between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, inclusive). This subject is not only of considerable interest in itself, but it also has a great deal of bearing on the questions concerning the applicability of the concept of causality that have been raised during the twentieth century in connection with the quantum theory. For, as we shall see in later chapters, the inadequacy in the microscopic domain of the mechanistic form of determinism into which causality was restricted by classical physicists helped to provoke a very strong reaction in the opposite direction, and thus helped to encourage modern physicists to go to the opposite extreme of denying causality altogether at the atomic level. It will therefore be worth our while here to study fairly carefully just what were the notions of causality and chance that came to be associated with classical physics and just what were the problems that arose in connection with the applications of these notions. Then, in later chapters, but especially in Chapter V, we shall criticize the mechanistic point of view and develop in some detail a more general point of view, in which the problems described above do not arise.
