nd the belief in continued existence of external objects. However, this is not the only indignity that arises at this point. We must also seek for causes and effects working from the immediate to the remote without being content with knowing the immediate causes, but instead by pushing on our enquiries and then to the "efficacious quality, on which the tie depends." (1.4.7, 5) However this is to be found merely in ourselves, the determination of the mind to make a transition. "Such a discovery not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes; since it appears, that when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning." (1.4.7, 5) Hume believed that ideas are always derived from impressions and that we cannot understand a word that we have never seen, unless you or I, have experienced sensory impressions of such a word or have had its meaning explained by means of other words that were directly associated with sensory impressions, at the time of learning. The meaning of such a word can be learned this way, only in such a way that the idea it expresses is complex and analysable into simpler components, in which all of our simple ideas must have been derived from impressions. Hume claimed that this is the kernel of truth in the empiricist doctrine and that there are no innate ideas. Hume also believed that we can always gain a clearer understanding of our ideas by asking from what impressions they were derived. Sometimes indeed, we find no impressions to correspond to some imagined idea, and according to Hume, we have to conclude that we have been using a word vacuously, without any idea or meaning being attached to it.As mentioned earlier in the essay, there is an argument for the claim that causal reasoning is of fundamental importance for our knowledge of matters of fact...
