It is commonly urged that the axiom of causation cannot be derived from
experience, because experience only proves that many things have causes,
whereas the axiom declares that all things have causes. The syllogism,
"many things which come into existence have causes, A has come into
existence: therefore A had a cause," is obviously fallacious, if A is
not previously shown to be one of the "many things." And this objection
is perfectly sound so far as it goes. The axiom of causation cannot
possibly be deduced from any general proposition which simply embodies
experience. But it does not follow that the belief, or expectation,
expressed by the axiom, is not a product of experience, generated
antecedently to, and altogether independently of, the logically
unjustifiable language in which we express it.
In fact, the axiom of causation resembles all other beliefs of
expectation in being the verbal symbol of a purely automatic act of the
mind, which is altogether extra-logical, and would be illogical, if it
were not constantly verified by experience. Experience, as we have seen,
stores up memories; memories generate expectations or beliefs--why they
do so may be explained hereafter by proper investigation of cerebral
physiology. But, to seek for the reason of the facts in the verbal
symbols by which they are expressed, and to be astonished that it is not
to be found there, is surely singular; and what Hume did was to turn
attention from the verbal proposition to the psychical fact of which it
is the symbol.
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