 As Hume repeatedly emphasizes, it is impossible to reveal the “ultimate causes of our mental actions”, and we have to be content with “experience and analogy” in explaining any act of the mind “by producing other instances, which are analogous to it, and other principles, which facilitate its operation” (THN 1.1.7.11). Finding analogies between different instances gives one the chance to explain causes and reduce them to “more general principles” (THN App. 3). For Hume, analogical reasoning is the key to most of our everyday and philosophical conclusions in empirical matters. Causal reasoning is partly but crucially founded on our capacity to recognize resemblances among different instances, and to extend our inferences based on previous observations to similar but unobserved instances. Thus, the recognition of resemblances is at the heart of our reasoning concerning any matter of fact, and the limits of this kind of reasoning are exactly where our capacity to recognize resemblances ends (THN 1.3.13.25). The proper method of both natural and moral philosophy is 