David Hume: Experience, Habit and Skepticism

David Hume of Edinburgh pushed empiricism to its limits. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739 to 1740), which he said 'fell dead-born from the press', and in later, clearer works, he argued that all our ideas come from impressions of experience. He then asked how we know that causes produce effects. We never observe a hidden necessary connection, he argued; we only see one event regularly followed by another, and habit leads us to expect the pattern to continue.

This 'problem of induction' suggests that our confidence in the future rests on custom rather than strict proof. Hume also argued that reason alone cannot motivate action, writing that reason is 'the slave of the passions', and that one cannot logically derive what ought to be from what is. His skepticism was not meant to paralyze daily life, which he believed nature compels us to live, but to make people more modest and less dogmatic.