Musings on Causality

Causality asserts that, in general, the Effect is preceded by the Cause. And this simple premise is no better applied than in the discipline of history as we know it. The study of the past can lead no further than the present, and the present is the very end to which history aspires. History, so it goes, is the natural progression from the times of antiquity to today. And the mountains of today were forged from ruins of the past, and this belief rests on the very notion of causality, that is, to repeat, that the effect is preceded by the cause. But do we not read the events of the past by the fragments of our present? Tacitly, we read history toward the conclusion of the present; we presume that history, and indeed the existence of the past, have served only to bring us to this very Present. And perhaps our idée fixe distorts our reading of the past, our chronoteleogical reading of the past deforms our conception of the present.