What is the correct answer to this question of Hume's I shall be rash enough to endeavour to indicate a little further on; meanwhile there can be no temerity in saying that whatever be the right answer, Hume's is certainly a wrong one. Habit plainly cannot be its own parent. It enables us to repeat more easily what we have already repeatedly done, but it cannot be the cause of our doing or being able to do anything for the first time. An infant that has once burnt its fingers by touching the flame of a candle, expects that if it touch the flame again it will burn its fingers again, but it does not expect this because it has been in the habit of expecting it. Neither, if we be here bidden to understand that the habit referred to is not any mental habit of our own, but a habit which we have observed certain phenomena to have of following each other, shall we thereby be brought one whit nearer the truth. Our infant with the burnt finger has not observed that flame is in the habit of burning. It only knows that flame did burn on the one occasion on which it tried the experiment, which experiment it consequently declines to repeat. Besides, no one needs to be told that inferences, though thus capable of being drawn from single occurrences, are drawn with increased confidence from observation of habit. We all know already that, having always found that fire burns, we infer that it always will burn. What we want to know is, why we draw this inference. This is the question which Hume puts, and respecting which he gives very positively the negative reply that the inference is not drawn either intuitively, nor yet by any process of the understanding. Yet that a body when not moving must needs be at rest, is not more certainly demonstrable than that inferences cannot possibly be drawn except in one or other of these two ways. Is not every inference a species of belief, and must not every belief be either innate within us, or have been acquired artificially; and, as in the latter case, it is a mental acquisition, must it not in that case have been acquired by an operation of the mind or understanding? Is it not clear, then, that inferences must always be either intuitive or ratiocinative; and is it not strange that Hume should deny that they ever are so? Yet stranger still is it, that even while denying them to be either one or the other, he, almost in the same breath, pronounces them to be both. For, after having on one page denied that they are founded on reason, or any process of the understanding, he describes them on the next page as being not simply founded on, but as being themselves 'processes of the mind,' 'processes of thought,' and immediately afterwards 'arguments,' nay, '_reasonings_ from experience;' and, yet again, after as short a pause, these very same 'reasonings,' and 'arguments,' and 'processes of the mind and thought,' he concludes by styling 'natural instincts which no reason or