In his work An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume outlines the problems inherent in the large philosophical corpus that he describes as "accurate and abstract" philosophy, and in particular in metaphysical speculations. Seeing that many of the philosophers who engage in this heavy metaphysical speculation (Aristotle, Locke, and Malebranche are particular examples) fall into errors that lead to absurd or counterintuitive conclusions, Hume hopes to limit metaphysical speculation to a realm in which he is less inclined . to a similar fate. Hume attempts to reign in the difficult kind of philosophy in service of the body of work he contrasts it with, the “easy and obvious,” by establishing a method and clarity for metaphysics that he hopes will lead to the kind of progress that science has made. view. In the course of his inquiry, however, Hume seems at different times to need more or less metaphysics, at times denying a rational basis for causation, and at others working from the notion of causation as a necessary premise in his evaluations and arguments. The overall effect this has on his project regarding metaphysics is unclear, and throughout this article I will outline his general arguments and commitments, particularly the emphasis he places on both experience and the scope of human reason , I will reconstruct his argument from these commitments, and finally evaluate the arguments in support of Hume's conclusions about metaphysics. Hume's first step in the second part of the Inquiry is to draw a line between impressions and ideas, where impressions are the experience of sense perception and ideas are memories of previous impressions, albeit with less vividness. This immediately excludes innate ideas from Hume's model of the mind, and while it can be adequately demonstrated that this… mind can be realized by directly experiencing the mind's ability to extend beyond the limitations he places on it; primarily about what the mind brings to experience. Even if the mind brings to experience some sort of structure or some other content from which it can anticipate the things it can experience a priori, we would have to experience that capacity before we can reasonably conclude that the mind is capable of such feats in light of the arguments of Hume. The only real options available to reintroduce the possibility of metaphysics are to experiment with a new capacity of the mind beyond Hume's description, or to push Hume's commitments to a point where they produce an absurdity and can be rejected by Hume's criteria..