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David Hume first published Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding in 1748 and later became retitled Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Enquiry is a twelve-chapter volume which argues against traditional theistic belief. While many topics that are tackled had appeared in A Treatise of Human Nature (Treatise), others make their first appearance in Enquiry.

Impressions and Ideas

"You find certain phenomena in nature.You seek a cause or author. You imagine that you have found him. You afterwards become so enamoured of this offspring of your brain, that you imagine it impossible, but he must produce something greater and more perfect that the present scene of things, which is so full of ill and disorder. You forget, that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or, at least, without any foundation in reason; and that you have no group to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions. Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be suited to the present appearances of nature: And presume not to alter these appearances by arbitray suppositions, in order to suit them to the attributes, which you so fondly ascribe to your deities."

(Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 11.15)

Hume was an empiricist. That is, he believed that all our knowledge is derived from our experience with the world outside of our minds via our senses, rather than through reasoning and theoretical speculation. Hume argued that the products of human mind will only ever be a combination of impressions, that which we experience directly via our senses, and ideas, relations between those impressions. The human mind can imagine that which we have no experienced, but such ideas are at the end of the day combinations of different experiences that have had. One example, Hume says, is the impression of gold and the impression of a mountain, which lead to the idea of a golden mountain. Similar to this is the idea of God. We have never directly observed God. Rather, we have taken various qualities – power, knowledge, benevolence – and have compounded them to create the idea of God. That is to say, His existence is not matter of fact.

Cause and Effect

If you put a pot of water over a hot stove, the water boils. The heat from the stove is the cause, and the boiling water is the effect. But how can we be sure of this? Is this truly cause and effect? Or is it correlation? We first observe heat, then we observe boiling water, but we have not observed the causal connection, only a sequence of events. How can we justify our idea that the hot stove has caused the water to boil when we can only be sure of our impressions? Consider any piece of evidence for God’s existence. Just as we do not observe the connection between a hot stove and a pot of boiling water, we do not observe the connection between a God and His miracles. How can we justify the existence of a God – a cause which we are already unable to confirm through direct observation – through His effects when there is no confirmed knowledge of their connection?

Problem of Induction

"[I]t implies no contradiction, that the course of nature may change, and that an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different or contrary effects. May I not clearly and distinctly conceive, that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, has yet the taste of salt or feeling of fire? Is there any more intelligible proposition than to affirm, that all trees will flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June?"

(Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 4.18)

Singular observations (that is, impressions) are the only statements that we can take as matter of fact. This idea is the base of an issue now called the Problem of Induction, or Hume’s Problem. Hume states that we should be skeptical of our general inductive theories because they are based on habits of thought rather than fact. The structure of our general theories is as follows: we make a large number of singular observations about some characteristic of the world, then we generalize and conclude that every similar instance will possesses the same characteristic. A classic example of this is the case of white swans. In 17th century London, swans had only ever been observed to be white. These singular observations of non-black swans were generalized, and the common belief was that all swans were white. However, regardless of the number of white swans that an individual, or community, observes, it does not eliminate the possibility that a black swan exists. In fact, such a possibility was eventually discovered on the coasts of Australia. Inductive generalization is reason to believe in cause and effect. But as we have seen, such reasoning is still flawed.

In Conclusion

"In human nature, there is a certain experienced coherence of designs and inclinatinos; so that when, from any fact, we have discovered one intention of any man, it may often be reasonable, from experience, to infer another, and draw a long chain of conclusions concerning his past or future conduct. But this method of reasoning can never have place with regard to a Being, so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun to a waxen taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection."

(Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 11.27)

  1. We are in no position to assume the traits of a God.
  2. We are in no position to make connections between a God and those events which we observe.
  3. We are in no position to claim that God follows the same rules of cause and effect as humans and the world around us follow.
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