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If Hume is right that our awareness of causation (or power, force, efficacy, necessity, and so forth - he holds all such terms to be equivalent) is a product of experience, we must ask what this awareness consists in. Rather, we can use resemblance, for instance, to infer an analogous case from our past experiences of transferred momentum, deflection, and so forth. And we can charitably make such resemblances as broad as we want. Even before you get to that point, however, you need to make sure you purchase a game that meets minimum standards of quality. You can purchase the right billiards cue for your style of play, whether fast, soft, strong, or measured. He holds that no matter how clever we are, the only way we can infer if and how the second billiard ball will move is via past experience. Hume points out that this second component of causation is far from clear. This is to disregard the discussion through which Hume accounts for the necessity of causation, a component which he describes as "of much greater importance" than the contiguity and succession of D1. An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.

And here it is important to remember that, in addition to cause and effect, the mind naturally associates ideas via resemblance and contiguity. What is meant when some event is judged as cause and effect? As we experience enough cases of a particular constant conjunction, our minds begin to pass a natural determination from cause to effect, adding a little more "oomph" to the prediction of the effect every time, a growing certitude that the effect will follow again. Nevertheless, ‘causation’ carries a stronger connotation than this, for constant conjunction can be accidental and therefore doesn’t get us the necessary connection that gives the relation of cause and effect its predictive ability. Two objects can be constantly conjoined without our mind determining that one causes the other, and it seems possible that we can be determined that one object causes another without their being constantly conjoined. But causation itself must be a relation rather than a quality of an object, as there is no one property common to all causes or to all effects. Although Immanuel Kant later seems to miss this point, arguing for a middle ground that he thinks Hume missed, the two categories must be exclusive and exhaustive.

There is no middle ground. So I plugged in an old idea I had floating around, which is that there are different critics with contradictory aesthetics who judge your painting, and you try to construct things that please enough of them to get by. The rules for both games are different but they can both be played on the same billiards table. Relations of ideas can also be known independently of experience. In both the Treatise and the Enquiry, we find Hume’s Fork, his bifurcation of all possible objects of knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact. Hume gives several differentiae distinguishing the two, but the principal distinction is that the denial of a true relation of ideas implies a contradiction. Causation is a relation between objects that we employ in our reasoning in order to yield less than demonstrative knowledge of the world beyond our immediate impressions.

Another method is to cash out the two definitions in terms of the types of relation. There are reams of literature addressing whether these two definitions are the same and, if not, to which of them Hume gives primacy. Our products are made to the premier standards and come with outstanding service. Hume’s Copy Principle demands that an idea must have come from an impression, but we have no impression of efficacy in the event itself. Strictly speaking, for Hume, our only external impression of causation is a mere constant conjunction of phenomena, that B always follows A, what is billiards and Hume sometimes seems to imply that this is all that causation amounts to. At best, they merely amount to the assertion that causation follows causal laws. Clearly it is not a logical modality, as there are possible worlds in which the standard laws of causation do not obtain. One alternative to fitting the definitions lies in the possibility that they are doing two separate things, and it might therefore be inappropriate to reduce one to the other or claim that one is more significant than the other. However, Blackburn has the first as giving the "contribution of the world" and the latter giving the "functional difference in the mind that apprehends the regularity." (Blackburn 2007: 107) However, this is not the only way to grant a nonequivalence without establishing the primacy of one over the other.