[1] P. 433. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]
Hume changes the meaning of this expectation by his account of the ‘remembrance’ which determines it. Bearing of his doctrine of necessary connexion upon his argument against miracles. This remembrance, as he describes it, supposes conception of a system of nature.
324. That a doctrine which reduces the order of nature to strength of expectation, and exactly reverses the positions severally given to belief and reality in the actual procedure of science, [1] should have been ostensibly adopted by scientific men as their own—with every allowance for Hume’s literary skill and for the charm which the prospect of overcoming the separation between reason and instinct exercises over naturalists—would have been unaccountable if the doctrine had been thus nakedly put or consistently maintained. But it was not so. Hume’s sense of consistency was satisfied when expectation determined by remembrance had been put in the place of necessary connexion, as the basis of ‘inference to matters of fact.’ It does not lead him to adjust his view of the fact inferred to his view of the basis on which the inference rests. Expectation is an ‘impression of reflection,’ and if the relation of cause and effect is no more than expectation, that which seemed most strongly to resist reduction to feeling has yet been so reduced. But if the expectation is to be no more than an impression of reflection, the object expected must itself be no more than an impression of some kind or other. The expectation must be expectation of a feeling, pure and simple. Nor does Hume in so many words allow that it is otherwise, but meanwhile though the expectation itself is not openly tampered with, the remembrance that determines it is so. This is being taken to be that, which it cannot be unless ideas unborrowed from impressions are operative in and upon it. It is being regarded, not as the recurrence of a multitude of feelings with a liveliness indefinitely less than that in virtue of which they are called impressions of sense, and indefinitely greater than that in virtue of which they are called ideas of imagination, but as the recognition of a world of experience, one, real and abiding. An expectation determined by such remembrance is governed by the same ‘fictions’ of identity and continued existence which are the formative conditions of the remembrance. Expectation and remembrance, in fact, are one and the same intellectual act, one and the same reference of feelings, given in time, to an order that is not in time, distinguished according to the two faces which, its ‘matter’ being in time, it has to present severally to past and future. The remembrance is the measure of the expectation, but as the remembrance carries with it the notion of a world whose existence does not depend on its being remembered, and whose laws do not vary according to the regularity or looseness with which our ideas are associated, so too does the expectation, and only as so doing becomes the mover and regulator of ‘inference from the known to the unknown.’
[1] It is by a curious fate that Hume should have been remembered, at any rate in the ‘religious’ world, chiefly by the argument against miracles which appears in the ‘Essays’—an argument which, however irrefragable in itself, turns wholly upon that conception of nature as other than our instinctive expectations and imaginations, which has no proper place in his system (see Vol. IV. page 89). If ‘necessary connexion’ were really no more than the transition of imagination, as determined by constant association, from an idea to its usual attendant—if there were no conception of an objective order to determine belief other than the belief itself—the fact that such an event, as the revival of one four-days-dead at the command of a person, had been believed, since it would show that the imagination was at liberty to pass from the idea of the revival to that of the command (or vice versa) with that liveliness which constitutes reality, would show also that no necessary connexion, no law of nature in the only sense in which Hume entitles himself to speak of such, was violated by the sequence of the revival on the command. At the same time there would be nothing ‘miraculous,’ according to his definition of the miraculous as distinct from the extraordinary, in the case. Taken strictly, indeed, his doctrine implies that a belief in a miracle is a contradiction in terms. An event is not regarded as miraculous unless it is regarded as a ‘transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent’ (page 93, note 1); but it could not transgress a law of nature in Hume’s sense unless it were so inconsistent with the habitual association of ideas as that it could not be believed. Hume’s only consistent way of attacking miracles, then, would have been to show that the events in question, as miraculous, had never been believed. Having been obliged to recognize the belief in their having happened, he is open to the retort ‘ad hominem’ that according to his own showing the belief in the events constitutes their reality. Such a retort, however, would be of no avail in the theological interest, which requires not merely that the events should have happened but that they should have been miraculous, i.e. ‘transgressions of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity.’
325. In the passage already quoted, where Hume is speaking of the expectation in question as depending simply on habit, he yet speaks of it as an expectation ‘of the same train of objects to which we have been accustomed.’ These words in effect imply that it is not habit, as constituted simply by the repetition of separate sequences of feelings, that governs the expectation—in which case, as we have seen, the expectation would be made up of expectations as many and as various in strength as have been the sequences and their several degrees of regularity—but, if habit in any sense, habit as itself governed by conceptions of ‘identity and distinct continued existence,’ in virtue of which, as past experience is not an indefinite series of perishing impressions of separate men but represents one world, so all fresh experience becomes part ‘of the same train of objects;’ part of a system of which, as a whole, ‘the change lies only in the time’. [1] If now we look back to the account given of the relation of memory to belief we shall find that it is just so far as, without distinct avowal, and in violation of his principles, he makes ‘impressions of memory’ carry with them the conception of a real system, other than the consciousness of their own liveliness, that he gains a meaning for belief which makes it in any respect equivalent to the judgment, based on inference, of actual science.
[1] P. 492. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
This explains his occasional inconsistent ascription of an objective character to causation.
326. Any one who has carefully read the chapters on inference and belief will have found himself frequently doubting whether he has caught the author’s meaning correctly. A clear line of thought may be traced throughout, as we have already tried to trace it [1]—one perfectly consistent with itself and leading properly to the conclusion that ‘all reasonings are nothing but the effect of custom, and that custom has no influence but by enlivening the imagination’ [2]—but its even tenour is disturbed by the exigency of showing that proven fact, after turning out to be no more than enlivened imagination, is still what common sense and physical science take it to be. According to the consistent theory, ideas of memory are needed for inference to cause or effect, simply because they are lively. Such inference is inference to a ‘real existence,’ that is to an ‘idea assented to,’ that is to a feeling having such liveliness as, not being itself one of sense or memory, it can only derive from one of sense or memory through association with it. That the inferred idea is a cause or effect and, as such, has ‘real existence,’ merely means that it has this derived liveliness or is believed; just as the reality ascribed to the impression of memory lies merely in its having this abundant liveliness from which to communicate to its ‘usual attendant.’ But while the title of an idea to be reckoned a cause or effect is thus made to depend on its having the derived liveliness which constitutes belief, [3] on the other hand we find Hume from time to time making belief depend on causation, as on a relation of objects distinct from the lively suggestion of one by the others. ‘Belief arises only from causation, and we can draw no inference from one object to another except they be connected by this relation.’ ‘The relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence’. [4] In the context of these disturbing admissions we find a reconsideration of the doctrine of memory which explains them, but only throws back on that doctrine the inconsistency which they exhibit in the doctrine of belief.
[1] Above, paragraphs 289 and ff.
[2] P. 445. [Book I, part III., sec. XIII.]