Hume: True Doctrine of Necessity

Hume talks about the true doctrine of necessity to begin his argument for compatibilism. His definition of determinism (necessity) is: "It is universally allowed, that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it." (54) In order to back this up, Hume proposes the idea of a world in which one event never resembled another. Every object and "scene of nature" is so entirely new to us that we cannot comprehend any connections between them. If this was the case, then we could say that events and objects followed each other, but we could never assert that one was produced by another. We would not have any knowledge of cause and effect. He concludes from this that our understanding of necessity and causation (and their existence in general) is evident from the uniformity of nature and the predictability of human actions. He asserts that if we are presented with an event or object for which we cannot understand a cause, then we must assume that we are simply incapable of understanding its cause. I'm inclined to agree with Hume on these points, as everything appears to have some physical or natural cause and we are not subject to randomness.