ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses various manners in which the term Cause has actually been used, Margenau insists on a distinction between 'total cause', which is what is in view in physical theories, and 'partial causes', which would be one or another part of the total cause that somehow specially engages the interest of a particular person. Margenau similarly conceives the principle of causality to be what he terms a metaphysical requirement. Accounts of the 'principle of causality', in terms of strict functional relations between the state of a system at a given time and its state at any later or earlier time, are given by Northrop. An additional important remark remains to be made concerning causation as defined in theoretical physics. It is that what is so defined is, ex hypothesi, physical causation; and hence that the theoretical physicist's definition of causation has no direct relevance.
