After elaborating on the truth (though it is true and knowable because of reason, not because of psychological persuasion or sensory experience like the reading of literature such as David Hume's book) that the effects of an object--the things it causes to happen, like explosions from gunpowder--are not knowable from cursory observation, David Hume uses the example of a table-based game. Plenty of people would think that they might just "know" or be able to easily prove from reason, upon seeing an item for the first time, what effects will come about from the alleged cause. Hume summarizes this tendency with the following words:
"We fancy, that were we brought, on a sudden, into this world, we could at first have inferred, that one Billiard-ball would communicate motion to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the event, in order to pronounce with certainty concerning it." (18)
Really, such people, all of them irrationalistic in some way or else they would avoid non sequiturs like this, could assume the motion and behavior of the balls ahead of time, but they would have no way to know. There is nothing logically necessary about one possible outcome or another being the exact thing that will occur. Including in some upcoming quotations, Hume admits this much in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Also, these people would have no previous sensory experiences or memories of this particular object and phenomena to look to, not that either visual sensory perceptions or memories of past events can be proven to be correct in their alignment with anything beyond the mind. As Hume puts it:
"Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary." (18)
Ironically, modern scientists might think this is what they avoid doing, yet anyone at all who thinks that the testimony of senses like sight and sound is verifiable or utterly foundational to truth and knowledge of the truth (it is none of these things!) is highly irrational. This kind of person is always likely to think that there is some empirical law or correlation that is apparent in itself, when this is not true; such causality is unknowable ultimately, the senses and the mind that contains those senses must by necessity precede scientific observation, and it is logical axioms alone that are true in themselves and without the possibility of being false. Even when a scientist is more careful in approaching some personally unfamiliar natural phenomena, he or she likely does with something else what Hume acknowledges the folly of.
Focusing on how an effect is not knowable from its real or apparent cause, David Hume soon speaks of how one Billiard-ball's motion is separate from that of the second which it might hit, the latter not being necessarily hinted at by the former. Stone and metal fall to the ground when dropped. As directly recognizable as gravity can be, no one, short of something like omniscience, would know a priori which logical possibility is the case--would the object fall upward, downward, in some other direction, or remain in place? This is not predictable in any rational sense. Hume returns to his example of billiards after this yet again. One "Billiard-ball" heading towards another reveals nothing to an observer about what will happen, just what seems likely after recalled observation:
"May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable." (18-19)
It is only because they have seen or heard of what is supposed to happen when striking a ball in billiards, leading to it potentially colliding with other balls, that someone would expect any particular outcome in this at all. The only possible exception would be the case if they lack the same epistemological barriers that I myself have, such as by being omniscient. That something as seemingly practical or trivial as a game of billiards would be subject to such limitations of knowledge about metaphysical existents and their nature would all but certainly confuse, shock, or irritate the typical person. Although he conflates reason itself and the human intellect and dives into other utterly irrational beliefs in the very work examined here, at least Hume does not assert something many moderners blindly hold to: that there is any scientific correlation so obvious that it can be inferred prior to observation.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume, David. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Print.
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