David Hume Quotes
... if you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning. The connection between the two is not intuitive. There is required a medium, which may enable the mind to draw such an inference, if indeed it be drawn by reasoning and argument. What that medium is, I must confess, passes my comprehension; and it is incumbent on those to produce it, who assert that it really exists, and is the origin of all our conclusions concerning matter of fact.
Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., Clarendon Press, 1902, p. 34.
This quotation is very interesting with reference to the modern debate about teaching creationism in the public schools. Two hundred years before, Shelly observed that before we can debate as to who was the designer, we must first prove that there was a design. He was skeptical, and this was before Darwin and modern astronomy. Today there are physicists who have shown how the Big Bang might have taken place without any plan, design or creation. And evolution explains how mankind and other life forms may have evolved without any specific species management or design.
David Hume, Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as a British Empiricist.
