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'Hume begins by distinguishing between impressions and ideas. Impressions are sensory impressions, emotions, and other vivid mental phenomena, while ideas are thoughts or beliefs or memories related to these impressions. We build up all our ideas from simple impressions by means of three laws of association: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.

For the most part, we understand matters of fact according to cause and effect, where a direct impression will lead us to infer some unobserved cause. For instance, I know the sun will rise tomorrow based on past observations and my understanding of cosmology, even though I have yet to observe this fact directly.

Hume suggests that we cannot justify these causal inferences. There is no contradiction in denying a causal connection, so we cannot do so through relations of ideas. Also, we cannot justify future predictions from past experience without some principle that dictates that the future will always resemble the past. This principle can also be denied without contradiction, and there is no way it can be justified in experience. Therefore, we have no rational justification for believing in cause and effect. Hume suggests habit, and not reason, enforces a perception of necessary connection between events. When we see two events constantly conjoined, our imagination infers a necessary connection between them even if it has no rational grounds for doing so.'

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