David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume argues that what we consider to be causal relations are simply associations made out of habit and hold no necessity of truth. Though he acknowledges that philosophy did not yet have the tools to place necessity on causal relations, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant argues that it is possible to do so. By reworking the frame of metaphysics, introducing synthetic, a priori knowledge, Kant avoids coming to Hume’s skeptical conclusions. Hume believes that philosophy has falsely arrived at its argument of objectivity. Specifically, causality is an assumption and cannot be demonstrated thus far. He builds this argument by dividing the mind’s perceptions into two distinct
Therefore a priori knowledge cannot offer a connection between ideas. Additionally, denying a relation of ideas must lead to a contradiction, so causality cannot be understood this way as it is reasonable to perceive one without the other. Hume concludes that the link we draw between cause and effect does not stem from a priori reasoning, or relations of ideas. It follows that causality must be matters of fact stemming from experience. However, past experience only tells us about objects and ideas as they were, implying nothing of the future. We say A causes B because we have experienced it this way, leading us to think of it as cause and
He continues by addressing how pure natural science is possible. For the study of nature, metaphysics, to be considered a science, our experiences must follow necessary and universal laws. In terms of causality, “a judgment of observation can never rank as experience, without the law, that ‘whenever an event is observed, it is always referred to some antecedent, which it follows according to a universal law,” (53). Thus, per universal law, when an event is observed to happen, it must be connected to some earlier event that is