vi CONCERNING NECESSARY TRUTHS 143 



ignorant of its cause, but he will, without hesita- 

 tion, seek for that cause. If you ask him why he 

 does so, he will probably say that it must have 

 had a cause ; and thereby imply that his belief in 

 causation is a necessary belief. 



In the " Treatise " Hume indeed takes the bull 

 by the horns : 



". . . as all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and 

 as the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, 'twill be 

 easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment 

 and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea, 

 of a cause or productive principle." (I. p. 111.) 



If Hume had been content to state what he 

 believed to be matter of fact, and had abstained 

 from giving superfluous reasons for that which is 

 susceptible of being proved or disproved only by 

 personal experience, his position would have been 

 stronger. For it seems clear that, on the ground 

 of observation, he is quite right. Any man who 

 lets his fancy run riot in a waking dream, may 

 experience the existence at one moment, and the 

 non-existence at the next, of phenomena which 

 suggest no connexion of cause and effect. Not 

 only so, but it is notorious that, to the unthinking 

 mass of mankind, nine-tenths of the facts of life 

 do not suggest the relation of cause and effect ; 

 and they practically deny the existence of any 

 such relation by attributing them to chance. 

 Few gamblers but would stare if they were told 

 that the falling of a die on a particular face is as 



