Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

Hume emphasized that the expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our mind. And expectation, as we have seen, is associated with habit. Going back to the child again, it would not have stared in amazement if when one billiard ball struck the other, both had remained perfectly motionless. When we speak of the “laws of nature” or of “cause and effect,” we are actually speaking of what we expect, rather than what is “reasonable.” The laws of nature are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, they simply are. The expectation that the white billiard ball will move when it is struck by the black billiard ball is therefore not innate. We are not born with a set of expectations as to what the world is like or how things in the world behave. The world is like it is, and it’s something we get to know.’ ‘I’m beginning to feel as if we’re getting off the track again.’ ‘Not if our expectations cause us to jump to conclusions. Hume did not deny the existence of unbreakable “natural laws,” but he held that because we are not in a position to experience the natural laws themselves, we can easily come to the wrong conclusions.’