Human Knowledge As Acquired from Experiences

The concept of substance is and so inferred from concrete impressions based on experience, and the experience mustiness antedate the concept or the concept would have no meaning. Hume uses the terminus "idea" in an ambiguous way that makes some of what he says about them unclear, and this means that their precise relationship to experience is also unclear to a great degree, and his distinction between impressions and ideas, spell it does understand that Hume believes experience can be divided into its region elements, also shows how the two types of perception have to be tie in to experience.

Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding addresses precisely what it says--human understanding, meaning the chance of knowledge, the mechanisms of knowledge, and the validity of knowledge. As noned, Hume believes that all the limit of the mind must derive from experience, and though he is in agreement with Locke on this, he uses different terminology. He uses the word "perceptions" to cover the contents of the mind in ordinary, and he then divides perceptions into impressions and ideas. Impressions ar the agile data of experience, corresponding to sensations. Ideas argon described by Hume as the copies or faint images of impressions in thinking and reasoning.

Hume claims that there are two elements found in all sheaths of causation--contiguity in prison term and place, and priority in time. Hume actually consi

ders another element, necessary connection. Hume says that all reasoning concerning matters of concomitant square off to be founded on the relation of cause and effect, and he says that by means of this relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and our senses. He offers as a general proposition that the knowledge of this relation is not attained by reasoning a priori but arise entirely from experience.

If we acquaint an object to a man, and if that object be entirely unfermented to him, he leave alone not be able to dampen any of its causes or effects:

No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the sense, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which allow arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever render any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact (614).

Another example Hume uses to demonstrate cause and effect is the case of the two billiard balls. We observe two billiard balls and see one approaching the other, and when we do, we should be able to imagine a hundred different events that might follow from this cause. Such reasonings would be a priori and would suggest all the possibilities that might come to mind. It is just through experience that we will know what will pass away when the one ball strikes the other, and all our reasoning a priori will ne'er show us any foundation for whatever we might believe will happen. Every effect, says Hume, thus is a distinct event following from its cause. The event will not be discovered in the cause, and the first invention of it a priori must be entirely arbitrary:

This means, says Hume, that causes and effects are discoverable not by reason but by experience, and he uses the analogy of two pieces of smooth marble to show it. Present such marble to a man with no knowledge of natural philosophy and he will never discover that they will adhere together so as to require great force to separate them in a direct line while making a gloomy resistance to a la
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