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Abstract Following a preface explaining Shepherd’s reasons for writing, the introductory chapter of ERCE aims to set out Hume’s position concerning “the necessary connexion of cause and effect” largely in his own words. It begins with his views as presented in his A Treatise of Human Nature and then cites An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding to show that he holds the same doctrines in that work. Hume’s “material proposition” is that “Nature may be conceived to alter her course, without a contradiction.” The chapter seeks to show that both works depend on the thesis, stated only in the Treatise, that “it is neither intuitively nor demonstrably certain [that] whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence.” It is important to refute this thesis, she concludes, because it leads to the dangerous atheistic consequence that there is no “necessity of a great first Cause, and ‘productive principle’ of all things.”
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