The notion of causation is central to Descartes’ metaphysics and physics. In his metaphysics, Descartes requires a specific sort of causal principle to support his claim in the Third Meditation that God must be the cause of his idea of God as infinite substance. In the discussion of the foundations of his physics in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), moreover, Descartes appeals to the distinction between God as the “universal and primary cause” of motion and the laws of nature as “secondary and particular causes” of it.

The context for Descartes’ theory of causation is provided by the Aristotelian views that were dominant in early modern Scholasticism. In the second book of his Physics, Aristotle explicates four different kinds of “cause” (aition): material, formal, efficient, and final. The material cause is that out of which something comes to be, the formal cause the form of that which comes to be, the efficient cause the primary source of change, and the final cause that for the sake of which there is a change. For instance, in the case of a bronze statue, the bronze is the material cause, the shape of the statue the formal cause, the sculptor the efficient cause, and the goal of the sculptor in producing the statue the final cause.

In early modern Scholasticism, there is an increasing emphasis on the priority of efficient causes in an account of causation (for this point, see Carraud 2002, ch. 1; Schmaltz 2008, 29–36). Thus, the early modern Scholastic Francisco Suárez (1967, I 384) claimed that efficient causes best reflect his official definition of a cause as that which serves “as a per se principle from which being flows into another.” Material and formal causes fit this definition imperfectly since they do not produce an external effect (“another”) but rather are “intrinsic causes” that constitute the effect. Though the final cause is similar to the efficient cause in being an “extrinsic cause” that produces an external effect, it nonetheless is able to “flow being into another” only by influencing the action of a particular kind of efficient cause, namely, an intellectual agent that cognizes the goal of its action.