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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
The following beliefs can be ascribed to Hume on the basis of his writings:
(1) There is no more to our idea of cause and effect than constant conjunction and a resulting habit of mind.
(2) There is more to it than that, namely the interaction of bodies.
(3) Behind the constant conjunctions, including the interactions of bodies, there are ‘secret’ causes, not knowable by man.
(4) The principle of causality (nothing happens without a cause) is true.
(5) Our belief in the principle arises from experience.
(6) There is no justification for believing in the principle.
It is obvious that there are inconsistencies between these beliefs. (1) is contradicted by (2) and (3), and (3) appears to contradict (2). (4) and (5) are consistent, but (4) cannot be asserted consistently together with (6). There is apparently a contradiction between (5) and (6), although (as often happens when discussing Hume) the question arises whether ‘arising from experience’ is to be regarded as a justification. In the next section I shall offer support for ascribing these beliefs to Hume and in sections III-V I shall try to say why Hume wanted to hold all of them in one way or another and how they fit together in the context of his philosophy. What I shall say will I be broadly in line with Passmore's views about the diversity of Hume's intentions and Kemp Smith's thesis about Hume's primary interest in ethics.
1 Passmore, John, Hume's IntentionsGoogle Scholar; Smith, N. Kmp, The Philosophy of David Hume.Google Scholar
2 References are to the Selby-Bigge editions of the Enquiries (E) and the Treatise (T).
3 P. 13. The whole paragraph is an echo of a passage in the Appendix to Newton, 's OpticksGoogle Scholar. Also see Passmore's discussion of Hume, and Newton, , op. cit., 49–50.Google Scholar
4 T 409–410. Compare 157, where he roundly declares ‘necessity’ and ‘connexion’, together with a number of other words, to be ‘nearly synonimous’.
5 Letters, ed. Greig, , p. 185Google Scholar. The exchange is reprinted by Smith, Kemp, op. cit., 411–413.Google Scholar
6 Hume Studies, volume 1.Google Scholar
7 The more sophisticated ‘methodology’ view, according to which it is an essential assumption of science, fares, I believe, little better.
8 See W. H. Walsh's discussion of the man who suggested that perhaps his car had broken down ‘for no reason at all’ (Kant-Studien, 1954).Google Scholar
9 Locke, Berkeley and Hume, 264–265.Google Scholar
10 A further point that may be made here is about the basic importance of concepts to which causal properties are analytic. Miss Anscombe, in her Inaugural Lecture (1971), has pointed out that concepts like push, scrape, wet, carry, eat, etc., are logically prior to the word ‘cause’ itself.
11 ‘I doubt not but, if we could discover the figure, size, texture and motion of the minute constituent parts of any two bodies, we should know without trial several of their operations one upon another, as we do now the properties of a square or a triangle. Did we know the mechanical affections of the particles of rhubarb, hemlock, opium, and a man, as a watchmaker does those of a watch…, we should be able to tell beforehand that rhubarb will purge, hemlock kill, and opium make a man sleep’ (Locke, 's Essay, IV, iii, 25).Google Scholar
12 See Lectures and Conversations, 15–17.Google Scholar
13 On page 164 of the Enquiry the two strands of Hume's thinking—his empiricism and his belief in the principle of causality—come closely together. In these, the final pages of the work, Hume reiterates his rejection of a priori knowledge of matters of fact. He accordingly denies the principle Ex nihilo nihil fit. Now one might have thought that this is tantamount to a rejection of the principle of causality—to an assertion that something may, for all we know, come into existence without a cause. This is not, however, the conclusion that Hume draws. ‘Not only the will of the supreme Being may create matter; but, for aught we know a priori, the will of any other being might create it, or any other cause, that the most whimsical imagination can assign.’ The one possibility that Hume is not prepared to consider is that it comes into being without a cause.
14 T 399–400. In the Enquiry the corresponding section on free will is placed immediately after that on ‘necessary connexion’. Their wide separation in the Treatise was evidently thought by Hume to be a mistake, and would be so according to the argument of the present paper.
15 Groundwork, 398.Google Scholar
16 ‘…what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and conceal'd cause’ (T 130).