293. The sequence of ideas, which this propensity determines, clearly does not involve any inference ‘beyond sense,’ ‘from the known to the unknown,’ ‘from instances of which we have had experience, to those of which we have had none,’ any more than does any other ‘recurrence of an idea’--which, as we have seen, merely means, according to Hume, the return of a feeling at a lower level of intensity after it has been felt at a higher. The idea which we speak of as an inferred cause or effect is only an ‘instance of which we have no experience’ in the sense of being _numerically different_ from the similar ideas, whose previous constant association with an impression like the given one, determines the ‘inference;’ but in the same sense the ‘impression’ which I now feel on putting my hand to the fire is different from the impressions previously felt under the same circumstances, and I do not for that reason speak of this impression as an instance of which I have had no experience. Thus Hume, though retaining the received phraseology in reference to the ‘conclusion from any particular cause to any particular effect’--phraseology which implies that prior to the inference the object inferred is in some sense unknown or unexperienced--yet deprives it of meaning by a doctrine which makes inference, as he himself puts it, ‘a species of sensation,’ ‘an unintelligible instinct of our souls,’ ‘more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our natures’ [1]--which in fact leaves no ‘part of our natures’ to be cogitative at all. [1] Pp. 404, 475, and 471. [Book I, part III., sec. VIII., part IV. sec. I. and part III., sec. XVI.] Nor determined by any objective relation. 294. We are not entitled then, it would seem, to say that any inference to matter of fact, any proof of an ‘instructive proposition,’--as distinct from the conclusion of a syllogism, which is simply derived from the analysis of a proposition already conceded,--rests on the relation of cause and effect. Such language implies that the relation is other than the inference, whereas, in fact, they are one and the same, each being merely a particular sort of sequence of feeling upon feeling--that sort of which the characteristic is that, when the former feeling only has the maximum of vivacity, it still, owing to the frequency with which it has been attended by the other, imparts to it a large, though less, amount of vivacity. This is the naked result to which Hume’s doctrine leads--a result which, thus put, might have set men upon reconsidering the first principles of the Lockeian philosophy. But he wished to find acceptance, and would not so put it. A consideration of the points in which he had to sacrifice consistency to plausibility--since he was always consistent where he decently could be--will lead us to the true αἴτιον τοῦ ψευδοῦς [1], the impossibility on his principles of explaining the world of knowledge.