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David HumeAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1748A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Experience as the Only Foundation of Knowledge
When Hume speaks about the distinction between cause and effect, he distinguishes between thoughts, ideas, and impressions. Impressions, he says, are the only true foundation and source of knowledge; they are the basis for all our ideas and every single thought we can have. There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. All thoughts owe their existence to some experience. As Hume insists, “all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones” (13).
One way that we can understand this is by comparing the experience of our impressions with our ideas. An idea is a purely mental reality; it is within the mind. We have ideas by pulling from our memories, since “every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression” (14). When we remember a warm fire, or a delicious meal, we experience delight and good feelings, but the memory of them pales in comparison with the actual experience. In this way, we easily recognize the superiority of the experience over the idea.
The impression is superior and needs to be the source of all our knowledge. There is nothing that we can imagine that was not first presented in some real experience. Even synthetic ideas of objects that have no real existence in the world come from our impressions. The imaginary creature of a unicorn, for instance, is derived from a horse and animals with horns; the various impressions combine to result in the idea of a unicorn. No rational process is capable of creating knowledge out of nothing. Anything that we conceive is a result of experience—“all the abstract reasonings in the world could never lead us one step towards the knowledge of it” (23).
The Tenuous Relation Between Cause and Effect
Human beings look for patterns in the world around them; it is unavoidable, a fact of human nature. Cause and effect is the recognized pattern that one thing or event is followed by a corresponding thing or event. When we recognize a recurring pattern, we say that object or event A is the cause of object or event B. For Hume, however, this simplistic account does not do justice to reality.
In Hume’s schema, effects are not intrinsically and necessarily related to so-called causes—they are merely recurring, associated phenomena. Human beings refer to a cause-and-effect relationship by force of habit: “If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent […] he would give you a reason” (19). The problem with attributing this cause/effect relation to something intrinsic and necessary, however, is there is nothing that can be genuinely accessed by the rational process. Instead, “the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience” (19).
One believes in a cause-and-effect relationship out of habit and not because it intrinsically exists, Hume stating that “the repetition of any particular act or operation [which] produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning” (32). Custom impels us to see a cause-and-effect relationship and to speak about related events as though one genuinely causes the other. It is only because we see a pattern of associated things that we conjure up a cause-and-effect relationship. Humans expect events to happen as they previously have, a conclusion reached by experience, not reason. Hume explains:
When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other (46).
The Impossibility of Miracles
Hume believed that experience is the source of all knowledge. Relatedly, he concluded that experience must be the benchmark by which all matters of fact are judged. If we know that things are true through our experience, then experience provides proof for how the world operates and exists—not simply in the here and now, but at all times and everywhere, especially if our experiences occur over an extended period. When it comes to the question of miracles, we must rely on our experiences—as we do in all other questions of truth.
A miracle involves the claim that something wildly outside the ordinary has occurred. We understand the world to work in a particular way, and a so-called miracle does not conform to that general experience: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature” (83). A miracle must be put into the context of all the experiences we have had, or of which we have been told, that contradicts it: “In all cases, we must balance the opposite experiments, where they are opposite, and deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence” (80). Only experience tells us whether something is true. The existence of a single event which militates against hundreds or even thousands of experiences to the contrary cannot be taken seriously.
The rational response to a supposed miracle is doubt. Our experience will force us to ask whether something has happened which we have simply misunderstood or misperceived. The answer becomes obvious. Based on the proof of experience, a miracle is impossible. As Hume writes, “we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion” (92).
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