Now, here it may be objected that if one took into account everything in the uni

verse, then the category of

contingency would disappear, and all that happens would be seen to follow necess
arily and inevitably. On
the other hand, there is no known causal law that really does this. It is true t
hat in any given problem we
may, by broadening the context of the processes under consideration, even find t
he laws which govern some
of the contingencies. Thus, in the case of the piece of paper being blown around
by the wind, we could
eventually study the laws which determine how the wind will blow. But here we wi
ll meet new
contingencies. For the behaviour of the wind depends on the locations of the clo
uds, on the temperatures of
bodies of water and land, and even as shown in some of the latest meteorological
studies, on beams of
electrons and ultraviolet rays which may be emitted with unusual intensity durin
g sunspots. This means,
however, that we must now go into the laws governing the formation of clouds, of
land masses, of bodies of
water, and of the processes in which the sunspots originate. Thus far, no eviden
ce has been discovered that
the possibility of tracing causal relationship in this way will ever end. In oth
er words, every real causal
relationship, which necessarily operates in a finite context, has been found to
be subject to contingencies
arising outside the context in question