David Hume's Relation Of Ideas

David Hume believes that there are connections between all ideas in the mind, and there are three different kinds: resemblance, contiguity in space-time, and cause-and-effect. He confirms that there must be some universal principles in the connection between all the ideas, but he has not shown what these universal principles are. In section IV, David Hume talks about the differences between relation of ideas and matter of fact. Relation of ideas are related to awareness or logically true statement such as “the sky is blue”. Matter of fact will go with cause-and-effect. When you see the sky dark, you will know it is going to rain because you have experiences this before. David concludes section IV that “our knowledge from experience is based on the principle of cause and effect”, “the principle of cause and effect is grounded in induction”, “induction relies on uniformity principle, that the future will resemble the past”, and “we come to know the uniformity principle from experience”.

If someone does understand cause and effect of life, he/she did see and went through a process recur so many times. Cause and effect, like the other two laws of association discussed in section III, allow the mind to move from one thought to another. Hume comments that it is fitting that our knowledge of causation should be formed by instinct rather than by reason. “It is very important that we see the world causally, since it is the source of all action and speculation, and reason is too unreliable a tool”. Sometimes the children’s argument are better than adults. Children argue with naturally thing while adults went through so many things so their argument always somehow