We can say with absolute certainty that the conception of cause dates from prehistoric times. Its beginning reaches back to the stone age, at least to neolithic, possibly to palæolithic culture. This is demonstrated by the careful reconstruction of these prehistoric races based on a critical comparison of the remains of their culture with that of primitive races living today. The ideas of these primitive races show an inclination to an extraordinary degree to explain all happenings in the world anthropomorphously. All happenings in surrounding nature are given the same origin as the activities of man himself. To man, on this plane of phantastic religious speculation, all events in nature appear as acts of the will of invisible powers, which, having originally proceeded from the souls of dead human beings, think, feel and act exactly as _he does_. This anthropomorphic conception of the occurrences in the surrounding world is one of the many conclusions which ensue from the supposition of an invisible soul, which can be separated from the body. It was this conception which gave the impetus for the transition of human thought from the era of the naïvely practical to the era of the theoretical spirit in that far removed age. In this anthropomorphic transference of personal subjective impulses of will to the objectively observed events of the surrounding world, lies the origin of causal conception, which since then has been generally used as the explanation of the happenings in the world. One cannot assert that the formation of the conception of cause is purely a product of _experience_, but rather a result of _naïve speculation_. Even if a later evolution of human thought shows a continued endeavor to dismantle the conception of cause of its primitive trappings and to modernize, as it were, its outer appearance, we still find today many inner components clinging to it, which do not agree with the strict demands of critical scientific exactness, demands which must particularly be made concerning a conception which has been given such fundamental importance in theoretical knowledge.