Causes Need to be Perceived

The Inference to a Cause Eventually Requires Evidence of that Cause

In its reasonings on [real] causes or effects, the mind carries its view beyond the objects it perceives or remembers.

However, it must never lose sight of those objects entirely, nor reason merely on its own ideas without those objects.

We see an efect and infer it from a cause.

We do this in only 2 ways:

1. By seeing or remembering the cause

2. By infering the cause from other causes in a chain until we arrive at the cause that we see or remember

We cannot carry on our inferences to infinity.

We need to see or remember that cause eventually.

Otherwise, we will have dounts.

For example, we may choose any point of history and consider why we believe or reject it.

We believe that Caesar was killed in the senate-house on the ides of March because this fact is established on the unanimous testimony of historians.

• They assign a precise time and place to that event, as well as certain characters.

That testimony was derived from another testimony, until we arrive at the testimony of the eyewitnesses.

Without the authority of the memory or senses, our whole reasoning would be chimerical and baseless.

• Every link of the chain would in this case hang on another.
• But there would be nothing fixed to sustain the whole.
• Consequently, there would be no belief nor evidence.

Hypothetical Arguments

This is actually the case with all hypothetical arguments.

Hypothetical arguments do not have any present impression nor belief of a real existence in them.

My doctrine is that we can reason on our past conclusions or principles, without having recourse to those impressions that they first arose from.

Even if these impressions were erased from the memory, the conviction that they produced might still remain.

All reasonings on causes and effects are originally derived from some impression, in the same way that the assurance of a demonstration always comes from a comparison of ideas.

This assurance may continue after the comparison is forgotten.