This paper analises some of the abundant ficticious situations conceived by Hume throughout his works to represent the absence of experience characterizing either an initial state, where experience doesn't exist yet, or a state where it doesn't exist anymore. We suggest that these fictitious situations, besides their more immediate goal of calling our attention to the fact that experience and habit are the only possible grounds for our causal inferences, also reveal the permanent tension between two opposite forces of attraction, to which our existences are subject according to Hume: one main force, that pulls us in the direction of the regularity and uniformity of natural laws and human nature, leading us away from the singularity, the pure difference among atomic perceptions, and the original indifference of imagination; and another force, which we perceive only in a shadowy way, but which nevertheless is present to us as a constant threat underneath all our associations, inferences, beliefs, and passions: the reign of pure singularity, the descent back into indifference, the ruin of human nature.
David Hume; experience; human nature; indifference; singularity