Philosophy question on Hume, FINAL TOMORROW, Can someone please help me!?

Sections IV and V of Hume's Enquiry aren't very long, but the language is difficult.

In Section IV, he questions how people know "Matters of Fact." (These are different from "Relations of Ideas," such as 3 times 5 = 1/2 of 30. He's not worried about that, here.) One example of a "matter of fact" is that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do we know this? From experience, he says. He gives special attention to "the relation of cause and effect."

How do we know that bread will nourish us? Well, from experience, stuff that tastes like bread (it has certain "sensible qualities") keeps us alive (it has "secret powers"). But how do we make this mental connection in the first place, and how can we be certain that the bread of the future will be as nourishing as the bread of the past? Even animals can learn this. But how?

In Section V, he proposes that reason is insufficient, because it is inflexible and leaps to conclusions too hastily. The answer is "custom" or "habit," which helps us remember and understand.

Quote:

"Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses."

Custom is an "operation of the soul." It's one of our "natural instincts." It gives us emotional preferences about, say, not burning ourselves in a fire. Reason alone cannot give us such a preference.

By "sceptical solution," he means a solution that takes seriously the question of how we know what we know. He means he's going to give an intellectual, rigorous, philosophical answer to these fundamental doubts about human knowledge. (The opposite would be a solution based on superstition or faith. For example, if someone said, "I have faith that bread will keep me alive, and that's all there is to it," that would be a religious answer, not a sceptical answer.)

If you are too lazy to study, this will be a skeptical solution to your problem: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22skeptical+solut... Good luck, because at this point you'll need a lot of it in order to pass.