ABSTRACT
Norman Kemp Smith, correcting what he takes to be the mistakes of others, attributes such a view to David Hume: Hume is no supporter of what is usually meant by the “uniformity” view of causation. For Hume, causality is a kind of relation, so he begins by explaining how this relation fits into the system of other relations. He first divides relations into two classes: “such as depend entirely on the ideas, which compare together, and such as may be changed without any change in the ideas”. Hume begins his investigation by considering a single instance of a causal relation. Under inspection, he claims to find only two features connecting the causal relata that are relevant to the causal relation that obtains between them: contiguity and priority. The cause and effect must be spatially and temporally contiguous, and the cause must be prior to its effect.
