Custom Is The Great Guide Of

From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section V, "Sceptical Solution of These Doubts." After demonstrating that reason alone cannot justify our belief in cause and effect, Hume concludes that it is custom — the mental habit formed by repeated experience of one event following another — that compels us to expect the same in the future. This is one of his most influential and provocative claims: the bedrock of everyday life and all empirical science is not logical proof but psychological habit, a finding that struck Immanuel Kant as the catalyst that awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber."