 Can the cause be distinguished from its effect so that the distinction does not depend on a temporal ordering of the events? For a long time the distinction between cause and effect was their temporal order. This view goes at least back to Hume who claimed, “We may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second,” which is to say that “[…] if the first object had not been, the second never had existed” (Hume, [1748] 2007, 56).  Although Hume did not explicitly say so, the expression “followed by” has always been read as “temporally followed by” and not “causally followed by”. So the adherents of this definition have usually tried to give an account of causation in which the cause and the effect are seen as temporal regularities between types of events. But we can also see that Hume himself added a counterfactual statement about causation which cannot be derived from his temporal definition. Apparently, he noticed that if we have a cause and an effect, there exists a relationship between them that is not given by the temporal order.