The famous “causality” versus choice paradox scene from the 2003 film Matrix Reloaded.

“First causes are not known to us, but they are subjected to simple and constant laws that can be studied by observation and whose study is the goal of natural philosophy … Heat penetrates, as does gravity, all the substances of the universe; its rays occupy all regions of space. The aim of our work is to expose the mathematical laws that this element follows … The differential equations for the propagation of heat express the most general conditions and reduce physical questions to problems in pure analysis that is properly the object of the theory.”

— James Maxwell (c.1870), Publication [1]

Merovingian: It is the way of all things. You see, there is only one constant, one universal, it is the only real truth: causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.

Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. Look there, at that woman. My god, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her, so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait… Watch – you see, I have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply, each line of the program creating a new effect, just like poetry. First, a rush… heat… her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand why – is it the wine? No. What is it then, what is the reason? And soon it does not matter, soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the ‘why’. ‘Why’ is what separates us from them, you from me. ‘Why’ is the only real source of power, without it you are powerless.

“Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories,—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen volumes of American history for no other purpose than to satisfy himself whether, by severest process of stating, with the least possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as at Harvard College.

Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

— Henry Adams (1900), The Education of Henry Adams (§25: The Dynamo and the Virgin)

“In treating society as a system, Pareto was doing for sociology what Gibbs had done for physical chemistry, what Bernard had adumbrated for physiology. Pareto’s social system was in important respects analogous to Gibbs’ physicochemical system. As Gibbs considered temperature, pressure, and concentration, so Pareto considered the manifestations of sentiments through words and deeds, verbal elaborations, and economic interests.

Now within the confines of a physicochemical system it is quite clear that all the factors involved are in a condition of mutual dependence which defies explanation by means of a cause-and-effect relationship. Change in one variable means change in all others. For example, if a stopper is thrust deeper into a thermos bottle containing ice, soda water, and whiskey—thus increasing the pressure—the concentration in both liquid and gas phases will change, the temperature will change, and the concentration of the solid phase will change. Similarly, the social system does not operate in terms of cause and effect; social conditions, like physicochemical conditions, are the result of simultaneous variations in mutually dependent variables.”

“While he was in the ministry, no married couple were allowed to separate; and the district courts were untroubled with either cause or process. A knowledge of the law, he was well aware, was necessary to him. He gave himself with all his might to the study of it, and very soon felt himself a match for the best trained advocate.”

— Narrator (P1:C2), background of Mittler

“I think,” interrupted Edward, “we can make the thing more clear to her, and to ourselves, with examples; conceive water, or oil, or quicksilver; among these you will see a certain oneness, a certain connection of their parts; and this oneness is never lost, except through force or some other determining cause. Let the cause cease to operate, and at once the parts unite again.”

— Edward (P1:C4), describing elective affinities

“You are not so wrong in that,” returned the Captain; “I have experienced too much trouble myself in life in matters of that kind. How difficult it is to prevail on a man to venture boldly on making a sacrifice for an after-advantage! How hard to get him to desire an end, and not hesitate at the means! So many people confuse means with ends; they keep hanging over the first, without having the other before their eyes. Every evil is to be cured at the place where it comes to the surface, and they will not trouble themselves to look for the cause which produces it, or the remote effect which results from it. This is why it is so difficult to get advice listened to, especially among the many: they can see clearly enough from day to day, but their scope seldom reaches beyond the morrow; and if it comes to a point where with some general arrangement one person will gain while another will lose, there is no prevailing on them to strike a balance. Works of public advantage can only be carried through by an uncontrolled absolute authority.”

— Captain (P1:C6)

“The same friend,” he went on, “has another law which he proposes. A marriage shall only be held indissoluble when either both parties, or at least one or the other, enter into it for the third time. Such persons must be supposed to acknowledge beyond a doubt that they find marriage indispensable for themselves; they have had opportunities of thoroughly knowing themselves; of knowing how they conducted themselves in their earlier unions; whether they have any peculiarities of temper, which are a more frequent cause of separation than bad dispositions. People would then observe one another more closely; they would pay as much attention to the married as to the unmarried, no one being able to tell how things may turn out.”

— A Friend (P1:C10)

“Historical causality determines the unique circumstances that have given rise to an event. Sociological causality assumes the establishment of a regular relationship between two phenomena which need not take the form ‘A makes B inevitable’, but may take the form ‘A is more or less favorable to B’.”

— Max Weber (date), Publication (Ѻ)

“The most common interpretation, however, is that "elective affinity" is used by Weber to express the fact that two sets of social facts or mentalities are related to each other or gravitate to each other — even though no direct and simple causality between the two can be established.”

— Richard Swedberg and Ola Agevall (2005), The Max Weber Dictionary (Ѻ)

“There are no laws in history similar to the laws of physico-chemical science. The causality of history is teleological.”

“This mumbo-jumbo of medieval phraseology connecting causality with purpose in history is another evidence of that professorial phenomenon, while the body moves and breaths in the twentieth century, while the mind is five hundred years behind its time.”

“There is only one method of apprehending the real nature of causality. This method is to begin with the world of data which we possess, i.e. our experiences, to generalize, to eliminate [deanthropomorphize] as far as possible all anthropomorphic elements and thus cautiously to elaborate an objective conception of causality. The many attempts which have been made in this direction show us that the best approach to the concept of causality consists in attaching it to the capacity of foretelling future events which we have acquired and tested in daily experience. And indeed there is no better means of demonstrating the causal connection between two events than to show that the occurrence of the one event can regularly permit us to forecast the occurrence of the other.”

— Max Planck (1936), The Philosophy of Physics [2]