I'm sure there was a philosopher who said that his deepest wish was to know just one cause. Been trying to find out who said it for ages with no luck, so maybe I'll just attribute it to myself.
David Hume perhaps? He reasoned that causality was not empirical and therefore was a habit of thinking humans acquired from constant conjunction of events. Kant was troubled by that so he elevated causality to a category of thought, like space and time, which the mind used to structure sensations.
+1 to Hume. He described causality as being a glorified expectation which is subject to change at any time.