  William claims “the creator alone properly and truly is worthy of the title ‘cause,’ but other things are merely messengers and bearers of the last things received as if sent from the creator” (OO I, 622a; Teske 1998a, 92). We speak of creatures as causes, but William says this is “ad sensum” (Switalski 1976, 79; Teske and Wade 1989, 117), that is, in respect of how things appear in sense experience.  Both medieval and contemporary commentators have on the basis of such remarks attributed to William the denial that creatures are genuine causes (see Reilly 1953). Certainly he denies that any creature can exercise fully independent causal agency, a view he thinks “the philosophers” have adopted. But this claim is compatible with admission of genuine secondary causes that are reliant for their exercise of causation on the simultaneous activity of prior causes, and ultimately on that of the first cause, God. Is William simply making this point but using the term “cause” in a more restricted manner than his contemporaries? A negative answer is suggested by William's rationale for his usage. He thinks of causation as the giving of being, and he thinks that anything that receives being, and therefore all creatures, cannot itself give being but can merely transmit it. Moreover, his metaphors of creatures as riverbeds or windows through which the divine causal influence flows strongly suggest that he really does wish to hold that creatures themselves do not really bring anything about but are simply the conduits through which divine causality flows.