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In both the Treatise and the Enquiry, we find Hume’s Fork, his bifurcation of all possible objects of knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact. It alone allows us to go beyond what is immediately present to the senses and, along with perception and memory, is responsible for all our knowledge of the world. Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from the world by any after-triumphs. And we can charitably make such resemblances as broad as we want. You can download the full game (7 megabytes), or else just look at the Read Me. Hume does not hold that, having never seen a game of billiards before, we cannot know what the effect of the collision will be. Although Immanuel Kant later seems to miss this point, arguing for a middle ground that he thinks Hume missed, the two categories must be exclusive and exhaustive. There is no middle ground. But causation itself must be a relation rather than a quality of an object, as there is no one property common to all causes or to all effects.

It might be tempting to state that the necessity involved in causation is therefore a physical or metaphysical necessity. But invoking this common type of necessity is trivial or circular when it is this very efficacy that Hume is attempting to discover. Hume points out that this second component of causation is far from clear. Clearly it is not a logical modality, as there are possible worlds in which the standard laws of causation do not obtain. At best, they merely amount to the assertion that causation follows causal laws. What is this necessity that is implied by causation? We must therefore follow a different route in considering what our impression of necessity amounts to. Strictly speaking, for Hume, our only external impression of causation is a mere constant conjunction of phenomena, that B always follows A, and Hume sometimes seems to imply that this is all that causation amounts to. But of these, causation is crucial. Of these, Hume tells us that causation is the most prevalent. How can Hume avoid the anti-realist criticism of Winkler, Ott, and Clatterbaugh that his own epistemic criteria demand that he remain agnostic about causation beyond constant conjunction? Nevertheless, ‘causation’ carries a stronger connotation than this, for constant conjunction can be accidental and therefore doesn’t get us the necessary connection that gives the relation of cause and effect its predictive ability.

Hume therefore recognizes cause and effect as both a philosophical relation and a natural relation, at least in the Treatise, the only work where he draws this distinction. For Hume, the denial of a statement whose truth condition is grounded in causality is not inconceivable (and hence, not impossible; Hume holds that conceivability implies possibility). A true statement must be one or the other, but not both, since its negation must either imply a contradiction or not. But if the denial of a causal statement is still conceivable, then its truth must be a matter of fact, and must therefore be in some way dependent upon experience. The underlying locking mechanism is still mechanical and may be subject to mechanical bypass. We are still relying on previous impressions to predict the effect and therefore do not violate the Copy Principle. What is meant when some event is judged as cause and effect? As we experience enough cases of a particular constant conjunction, our minds begin to pass a natural determination from cause to effect, adding a little more "oomph" to the prediction of the effect every time, a growing certitude that the effect will follow again. This certitude is all that remains.

Of the philosophical relations, some, such as resemblance and contrariety, can give us certitude. And here it is important to remember that, in addition to cause and effect, the mind naturally associates ideas via resemblance and contiguity. We simply use resemblance to form an analogous prediction. Rather, we can use resemblance, for instance, to infer an analogous case from our past experiences of transferred momentum, deflection, and so forth. For instance, a horror movie may show the conceivability of decapitation not causing the cessation of animation in a human body. We may therefore now say that, on Hume’s account, to invoke causality is to invoke a constant conjunction of relata whose conjunction carries with it a necessary connection. Hume argues that we cannot conceive of any other connection between cause and effect, because there simply is no other impression to which our idea may be traced. By so placing causation within Hume’s system, we arrive at a first approximation of cause and effect. Yet given these definitions, it seems clear that reasoning concerning causation always invokes matters of fact. Further, given Hume’s skeptical attitude toward speculative metaphysics, it seems unlikely that he would commit the Epistemic Fallacy and allow the inference from "x is all we can know of y" to "x constitutes the real, mind-independent essence of y," as some (though not all) reductionist accounts would require.

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