s like Kant felt that history had placed them in the unique position of being able to provide clear reasons and arguments for their beliefs. The ideas of earlier generations, they thought, had been determined by myths and traditions; their own ideas were based on reason. (According to this way of thinking, the French monarchy's claims to power were based on tradition; reason prescribed a republican government like that created by the revolution.) Kant's philosophical goal was to use logical analysis to understand reason itself. Before we go about analyzing our world, Kant argued, we must understand the mental tools we will be using. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant set about developing a comprehensive picture of how our mind--our "reason"-- receives and processes information. Kant later said that the great Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) had inspired him to undertake this project. Hume, Kant said, awoke him from an intellectual "slumber." The idea that so inspired Kant was Hume's analysis of cause-and-effect relationships. When we talk about events in the world, Hume noted, we say that one thing "causes" another. But nothing in our perceptions tells us that anything causes anything else. All we know from our perceptions is that certain events regularly occur immediately after certain other events. "Causation" is a concept that we employ to make sense of why certain events regularly follow certain other events. Kant took Hume's idea and went one step further. Causation, Kant argues, is not just an idea that we employ to make sense of our perceptions. It is a concept that we cannot help but employ. We don't sit around watching events and then develop an idea of causation on the basis of what we see. When we see a baseball break a window, for instance, we don't need to have seen balls break windows before to say that the ball "caused" the window to break; causation is an idea that we automatically bring to be...
