And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connection or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning , when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life. Intentionally or not, Hume's shifting of the burden of proof serves to protect his theory from refutation, according to the obvious avenue of refutation that he had just recognized himself. Such a theory simply begs the question, and it is hard to imagine that an acute thinker like Hume would fail to recognize that. In any case, having incautiously offered the terms of his test, he quickly enough prepared the way for his rejection of inconvenient concepts. But Hume can never recover from his presuppositions that because there is no impression, we cannot know that there is anything there in nature .
Nothing farther is in the case.
Although Hume may think that he has formally met his challenge to account for the ideas of power and necessary connection, his answer has the drawback of no longer being about the world, but just about the operations of the mind. Thus, although causality, force, and the like can be saved for physics, moral concepts like free will, or religious concepts like God or the soul, cannot be saved. However, since Hume himself views the convictions of custom and habit as perhaps wise provisions of Nature against the imperfections and uncertainties of our reason, there is in principle no reason why Nature should not also have provided us with convictions that do not relate directly to perceptual objects in the manner identified by Hume. If Hume is offering up a description of human nature, he obviously overlooks the circumstance that human nature in all times and places has tended to turn to religious expression. The certainty that Hume attributes to the necessary connection of causality and the laws of nature has been a matter of confusion ever since.