ABSTRACT
Hume is a scientist of man who believes that every event has a cause. Most of us are perhaps inclined to agree, at least with respect to the happenings of brute physical nature. In any case, we do not believe that inanimate bodies have anything we would regard as freedom or liberty-that they can change the direction or speed of their motion, for example, independently of the causal forces operating on them. Hume claims that the same thing holds for those parts of nature that involve ‘actions of the mind’. This includes not just ‘mental events’ alone, but human actions generally.
