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§ 21. Until a few years ago the hope of the physicist seems on the whole to have been that he would eventually be able to exhibit a single interconnected system of perfectly deterministic causal laws. He took the relation of cause and effect in all change to be such that from a determinate antecedent state of that which changes there must necessarily follow a different subsequent state of it, and it was assumed by him that complete knowledge of the antecedent state must enable exact prediction of the subsequent state. I do not think it matters here whether that which changes was taken as a limited subject of change or as the whole physical world.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1934
References
page 452 note 1 Nature of the Physical World, pp. 123–4.
page 455 note 1 Assuming, of course, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is true, and that physics cannot exclude genuine change from its world.
page 456 note 1 See Part I, §§ 10 and 11.
page 456 note 2 Ibid., § 4.
page 459 note 1 Despite his doctrine of pure ἐνέργεια, in which he attempts, without complete success, the absolute fusion of permanence and flux.