Page:An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - Hume (1748).djvu/180

 Experience, which renders a Dog apprehensive of Pain, when you menace him, or lift up the Whip to beat him? Is it not even Experience, which makes him answer to his Name, and infer, from such an arbitrary Sound, that you mean him, rather than any of his Fellows, and intend to call him, when you pronounce it in a certain Manner, and with a certain Tone and Accent?

all these Cases, we may observe, that the Animal infers some Fact beyond what immediately strikes his Senses; and that this Inference is altogether founded on past Experience, while the Creature expects from the present Object the same Events, which it has always found in its Observation to result from similar Objects.

Secondly. 'Tis impossible, that this Inference of the Animal can be founded on any Process of Argument or Reasoning, by which he concludes, that like Events must follow like Objects, and that the Course of Nature will always be regular in its Operations. For if there be in reality any Arguments of this Nature, they surely lie too abstruse for the Observation of such imperfect Understandings; since it may well employ the utmost Care and Attention of a philosophic Genius to discover and observe them. Ani