The Great Connexion: Hume's Metaphysical Logic Of Belief- Constructed Causation

In the epistemological context, Hume argues that we can have no rational knowledge of matters of fact, reason in its strict or a priori sense yielding intuitive or demonstrative knowledge only of relations among ideas. Rather, our knowledge of matters of fact involves our applying a psychologically constituted relation of causal necessity to empirical elements. And while these elements, impressions and ideas, manifest relations of contiguity, succession and repetition, they do not reveal that crucial relation of power or necessary connection essential to causal inference, and to its mental source and form, 'belief'. Accordingly, the relation of power or necessary connection is somehow formed and felt by the mind, and applied adventitiously to experience hence articulated as causeto-effect or effect-from-cause, as the idea of 'effect', or 'cause', is inferred from a 'present impression' of the other, respectively. As Hegel puts it, "Necessity is thus not justified by experience, but we carry it into experience; it is accidentally arrived at by us and is subjective merely." While we regard the empirical causal relation as necessary, whether