Hume Quote on Induction: The Future Resembles the Past

Quote

"The supposition, that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit, by which we are determined to expect for the future the same train of objects, to which we have been accustomed."

— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Section IV, Part II)

Historical Context

The passage appears in the fourth section of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), where David Hume sets out his celebrated analysis of causation. Hume distinguishes two kinds of objects of the understanding: "relations of ideas" — truths of logic and mathematics, certain but uninformative about the world — and "matters of fact" — informative but never certain. All reasoning about matters of fact, he argues, depends on the relation of cause and effect; and our knowledge of cause and effect is never a priori but always founded on experience. Yet experience teaches nothing about the future unless we assume that the future resembles the past — and this assumption itself cannot be justified by experience without circularity. Probable reasoning about the unobserved therefore rests on a principle that reason can neither prove nor discover: the uniformity of nature, which we accept, Hume concludes, "from mere custom." The passage is the classic statement of the problem of induction, and it is one of the most consequential arguments in the history of philosophy — an argument that, as Kant confessed, first "awakened him from his dogmatic slumber."

Philosophical Interpretation

Hume's point is not that induction is unreliable in practice — he insists we cannot help relying on it. His point is that its justification cannot be supplied by reason. Any attempt to prove that the future resembles the past either rests on experience, which presupposes the very principle at issue, or rests on reason, which is too weak to establish a substantive claim about the course of nature. The consequence is a radical conclusion about the limits of reason: the most important inferences we make — that bread nourishes, that fire burns, that the sun will rise — are underwritten by custom and belief, not by demonstration. This is simultaneously skeptical and therapeutic: Hume the skeptic shows that certainty about the future is impossible; Hume the empiricist shows that we do not need it, because nature has equipped us with a habit that works. The problem of induction has dominated the philosophy of science ever since. Karl Popper accepted Hume's skeptical conclusion and built falsificationism on it: science does not justify universal laws by induction but proposes bold conjectures and subjects them to refutation. The debate remains open, but Hume's formulation fixed its terms: any account of scientific method must explain how we get from the observed to the unobserved, and Hume showed how hard that explanation is.

Related Concepts

The problem of induction is analyzed in the answer page what is the problem of induction, and its place in the theory of reasoning in deduction vs. induction. Hume's full account of causation appears in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Popper's response in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The empiricism and skepticism philosophy pages situate the argument in its tradition, and the scientific method topic connects it to the practice of science.

Learning Path

1. Start with the thinker: Read the David Hume page for his empiricism and theory of the understanding.
2. Read the source: Sections IV–VII of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding contain the full argument about causation and induction.
3. Understand the problem: The answer page what is the problem of induction states the argument and its variations.
4. Explore the responses: Popper's falsificationism in what is falsification and The Logic of Scientific Discovery is the most influential reply.
5. Apply it: The habit-versus-reason distinction is central to critical thinking about probabilistic and empirical claims in everyday life.