stonished that it is not
to be found there, is surely singular; and what Hume did was to turn
attention from the verbal proposition to the psychical fact of which it
is the symbol.

"When any natural object or event is presented, it is impossible
for us, by any sagacity or penetration, to discover, or even
conjecture, without experience, what event will result from it, or
to carry our foresight beyond that object, which is immediately
present to the memory and senses. Even after one instance or
experiment, where we have observed a particular event to follow
upon another, we are not entitled to form a general rule, or
foretell what will happen in like cases; it being justly esteemed
an unpardonable temerity to judge of the whole course of nature
from one single experiment, however accurate or certain. But when
one particular species of events has always, in all instances, been
conjoined with another, we make no longer any scruple of
foretelling one upon the appearance of the other, and of employing
that reasoning which can alone assure us of any matter of fact or
existence. We then call the one object _Cause_, the other _Effect_.
We suppose that there is some connexion between them: some power in
the one, by which it infallibly produces the other, and operates
with the greatest certainty and strongest necessity.... But there
is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single
instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar; except only,
that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried
by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual
attendant, and to believe that it will exist.... The first time a
man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of
two billiard balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was
_connected_, but only that it was _conjoined_, with the other.
After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then
pronounces them to be _connected_. What alteration has happened to
give rise to this new idea of _connexion_? Nothing but that he now
_feels_ those events to be _connected_ in his imagination, and can
readily foresee the existence of the one from the appearance of the
other. When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with
another we mean only that they ha