ABSTRACT
The target of the romantic critique of causality was the enlargement instead of the restriction of causality, which empiricism had preached. This chapter analyzes some of the criticisms raised against causality by romanticism. It examines the romantic claim that causation is but an abstraction from interdependence, in the restricted and precise form set forth by Ernst Mach. Mach decried causation as an abstraction and as an insufficient concept which becomes superfluous as soon as interconnections are taken into account. The functional view of causation has suggested naive solutions to time-honored problems. Functionalism is consistent with organismic cosmologies, and is true to the extent to which organicism is true, its element of truth being that real connections are not one-sided but many-sided, and variable instead of static. The net result of the empiricist critique of causality was consequently a restriction of determination to regular association or invariable succession.
