and which, therefore, cannot, in the strict sense of the word, be an object of our knowledge. But, when we consider Who it was who formed us, it would, in truth, have been more wonderful, if the mind had been so differently constituted that the belief had not arisen; because, in that case, the phenomena of nature, however regularly arranged, would have been arranged in vain, and that Almighty Being, who, by enabling us to foresee the physical events that are to arise, has enabled us to provide for them, would have left the creatures, for whom he has been so bounteously provident, to perish, ignorant and irresolute, amid elements that seemed waiting to obey them,--and victims of confusion, in the very midst of all the harmonies of the universe. Mr Hume, indeed, has attempted to show, that the belief of the similarity of future sequences of events is reducible to the influence of custom, without the necessity of any intuitive expectation; but he has completely failed in the reasoning with which he has endeavoured to support this opinion. Custom may account for the mere suggestion of one object by another, as a part of a train of images, but not for that belief of future realities, which is a very different state of mind, and which, perhaps, does not follow every such suggestion, however frequent and habitual. The phenomenon A, a stone has a thousand times fallen to the earth; the phenomenon B, a stone will always, in the same circumstances, fall to the earth; are propositions that differ as much as the propositions, A, a stone has _once_ fallen to the earth; B, a stone will always fall to the earth. At whatever link of the chain we begin, we must still meet with the same difficulty--the conversion of the past into the future. If it be absurd to make this conversion at one stage of inquiry, it is just as absurd to make it at any other stage; and, as far as our memory extends, there never was a time at which we did not make the instant conversion,--no period, however early, at which we were capable of knowing that a stone had fallen, and yet believed that, in exactly the same circumstances, there was no reason to suppose that it would fall again. But on this particular error of Mr Hume, the very narrow outline, within which the present sketch is necessarily bounded, will not permit me to enlarge. I have examined it, at considerable length, in the third edition of the Inquiry which I have published on the Relation of Cause and Effect. It is more immediately our present purpose to consider, What it truly is which is the object of inquiry, when we examine the physical successions of events, in whatever manner the belief of their similarity of sequence may have arisen? Is it the mere series of regular antecedents and consequents themselves? or, Is it any thing more mysterious, which must be supposed to intervene and connect them by some invisible bondage?