What Russell Got Right

[Introduction] Bertrand Russell's 'On the Notion of Cause' is now 90 years old, yet its central claim still provokes. To summarize his argument, I can do no better than to provide an excerpt from his oft-quoted introduction: the word 'cause' is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable ... All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word 'cause' never appears. Dr James Ward ... makes this a ground of complaint against physics ... To me, it seems that ... the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (Russell 1913, p. 1)