What you say here reminds me a bit of Hume. Hume attacked cause and effect by noting that all we ultimately have access to are our perceptions, and that we can

What you say here reminds me a bit of Hume. Hume attacked cause and effect by noting that all we ultimately have access to are our perceptions, and that we can never perceive "cause." We may see the hammer flying through the air, then the window shattering, but we don't see any "cause" here. Just event A followed by event B. For Hume, our mind naturally correlates these events, and we call it cause and effect. Kant then followed by saying that this account was incomplete and that cause and effect are more like a type of lens through which we organize our perceptions, without which, we couldn't make sense of the world. *Vastly oversimplifying huge swaths of 18th century philosophy here, so don't take this very seriously.