How did Hume’s view of causation differ from Descartes’s view?

The views of David Hume and René Descartes on causation represent fundamentally different approaches to the nature of reality and human knowledge.

Descartes, a proponent of rationalism, viewed the physical world as a system governed by mechanical laws. He believed that the universe was a rationally ordered whole where parts were linked by logical necessity, making the structure of reality intelligible to the human intellect. For Descartes, understanding physical phenomena involved analyzing primary qualities like size, shape, and motion, operating under a mechanistic framework established by God.12

In contrast, Hume, an empiricist, rejected the idea of a "necessary connection" between cause and effect. He argued that we never observe such a connection in nature; rather, we only observe that certain events are "constantly conjoined" in our experience. Hume contended that our belief in causality arises from a habitual association in the mind, which creates a psychological expectation that an effect will follow a cause. Consequently, Hume viewed facts as disconnected, asserting that no matter of fact logically entails another, a position that stands in direct opposition to the rationalist belief in a world bound by logical necessity.342