connexion between them
which causes one to be inferred from the other? The connexion is
unhesitatingly pronounced by him to be neither intuitively perceived,
nor yet to be 'founded on any process of the understanding.' If you
insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, he challenges
you to produce that reasoning, and taking for granted that you have none
to produce, he proceeds to indicate what principle it is which, in his
opinion, does determine us to form the inference. That principle he
declares to be custom or habit, by which alone, he asserts, we are,
after the constant conjunction of two objects, determined to expect the
one from the appearance of the other; adding that all inferences from
experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

What is the correct answer to this question of Hume's I shall be rash
enough to endeavour to indicate a little further on; meanwhile there can
be no temerity in saying that whatever be the right answer, Hume's is
certainly a wrong one. Habit plainly cannot be its own parent. It
enables us to repeat more easily what we have already repeatedly done,
but it cannot be the cause of our doing or being able to do anything for
the first time. An infant that has once burnt its fingers by touching
the flame of a candle, expects that if it touch the flame again it will
burn its fingers again, but it does not expect this because it has been
in the habit of expecting it. Neither, if we be here bidden to
understand that the habit referred to is not any mental habit of our
own, but a habit which we have observed certain phenomena to have of
following each other, shall we thereby be brought one whit nearer the
truth. Our infant with the burnt finger has not observed that flame is
in the habit of burning. It only knows that flame did burn on the one
occasion on which it tried the experiment, which experiment it
consequently declines to repeat. Besides, no one needs to be told that
inferences, though thus capable of being drawn from single occurrences,
are drawn with increased confidence from observation of habit. We all
know already that, having always found that fire burns, we infer that it
always will burn. What we want to know is, why we draw this inference.
This is the question which Hume puts, and respecting which he gives
very positively the negative reply that the inference is not drawn
either intuitively, nor yet by any process of the understanding. Yet
that a body whe