Experience, causation, and induction › The limits of a useful skepticism

Section XII develops mitigated skepticism. Hume recommends caution and modesty about our powers, together with a restriction of inquiry to subjects suited to those powers. He contrasts this with an excessive skepticism that cannot remain effective in the occupations of common life. The result is neither universal certainty nor durable disbelief in everything. E 12.21–25.

His final paragraph challenges works that contain neither abstract reasoning about quantity or number nor experimental reasoning about fact and existence. The incendiary language targets speculative pretensions to knowledge. Reading that ending alongside the preceding defense of cautious inquiry matters: the book has spent its central sections examining the limits of the reasoning on which common life depends, while continuing to use and discriminate among forms of that reasoning. E 12.34.

The question about tomorrow therefore survives a useful answer about what to do. You can check the timetable and make a sensible plan. You can revise it when evidence changes. You can also recognize that the expectation reaches beyond the past arrivals you observed. Hume makes that additional step visible, then asks us to understand the habits that make it possible.