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You wake up, and look out the window. Everything is wet. You say: "It rained last night". But
wait. How did you reach that conclusion? Hume says, look inside your mind. You figured it
out like this: Last night, when I went to bed, everything outside was dry. This morning,
I am seeing that everything is wet. Rain causes everything to get wet. Therefore, it rained
in the night. Think about your reasoning. You used facts
you remember and a fact you are witnessing. And you used these facts to infer something
you did NOT experience, namely, that it rained in the night.
That's Remarkable! We do this kind of thing all the time! But notice. Whenever we do,
says Hume, we use the relation of cause and effect.
Hume says, it's just part of human nature! Our minds can fill in gaps in our experience.
And these gaps don't have to be in the past. They can be in the present or even in the
future. You hold a tennis ball above the ground. You
flick your wrist. Just before you release the ball, you think, "the ball will bounce
off the ground high enough so I can catch it."
But wait. How did you reach that conclusion? By using the same style of reasoning you used
when thinking about the rain. That's remarkable! Notice, you used the relation of cause and
effect, to reach your conclusion. So, Hume says, whenever we infer a fact we
have not witnessed, we are using the relation of cause and effect.