Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hume on Knowledge

Harold Noonan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415150477
• eBook ISBN: 9781134747849
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

David Hume was one of the most important British philosophers of the eighteenth century. The first part of his Treatise on Human Nature is a seminal work in philosophy. Hume on Knowledge introduces and assesses:
* Humes life and the background of the Treatise
* The ideas and text in the Treatise
* Humes continuing importance to philosophy

Chapter 1
Introduction
Hume’s life and work

Hume’s life and times

David Hume, the last of the so-called ‘three great British empiricists’—the others being Locke (1632– 1704) and Berkeley (1685–1753)—was born on 26 April 1711, in Edinburgh, seven years after the death of Locke and when Berkeley was a young man of 26. His father was Joseph Home of Ninewells, a small landholding in Berwick-on-Tweed (David adopted the spelling ‘Hume’ when he left Scotland in 1734 to avoid mispronunciation by the English). His family were quite prosperous gentry and strict Presbyterians.

Hume’s father died when he was only two and his mother never remarried. He was a precocious reader, described by his mother as ‘uncommonly wake-minded’, and in 1722 the family moved to Edinburgh so that he and his brother John could study at Edinburgh University. Hume matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1723 at the age of 12—this was younger than was usual but not exceptionally so. There he acquired a grounding in the classical authors, logic and metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics and mathematics. In his brief autobiography ‘My Own Life’ (1993b:351–6) he describes this period of his life thus:

I passed through the ordinary course of education with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyment. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me, but I found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly devouring.

(1993b:351)

Hume left Edinburgh University without taking a degree and abandoned his half-hearted study of law by 1729 when he embarked upon the philosophical study that was to lead to his writing of A Treatise of Human Nature (1978). In Hume’s own words he ‘entered upon a new scene of Thought’ and pursued it with such intensity that it led to a breakdown in his health, one result of which was a remarkable letter Hume wrote to an unnamed physician, probably John Arbuthnot, in which he described his symptoms in clinical terms and explained how a ravenous appetite transformed him in six weeks from ‘a tall, lean and rawboned youth to the most sturdy, robust, healthful-like fellow you have ever seen, with a ruddy complexion and cheerful countenance’ (1993a:348)—the familiar figure of the famous Allan Ramsay portraits. Hume’s illness also had a significant effect on his mind. Though he had ‘scribbled many a Quire of Paper’ containing nothing but his own inventions, his illness made him incapable of ‘reducing these to words’ and copying ‘the parts in order’, and so delivering his opinions with ‘such elegance and neatness as to draw the attention of the World’ (1993a:349).

In the hope that a period of alternative employment would enable him subsequently to resume his philosophical studies with renewed vigour, in 1734 Hume took up a post as a merchant’s clerk in Bristol,but he soon quarrelled with his employer and left for France to continue study and writing. There he lived first at Rheims and then at La Flèche, the small country town containing the Jesuit college in which Descartes had been educated. There, by 1737, he completed the Treatise. Hume then returned to London to find a publisher, and the Treatise was published anonymously, with Books 1 and 2 appearing in 1739, and Book 3 following in 1740 along with an ‘Appendix’ which contained some corrections to and modifications of his already published material.

The reception of the Treatise was far from being what Hume had hoped for. It ‘fell dead-born from the press’, he wrote, ‘without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among zealots’ (1993a:352). This largely hostile and uncomprehending reception— on which Hume’s anonymous publication of (what is now generally accepted by scholars to be) his own ‘Abstract’ in 1740 had no effect, despite its brilliant survey of the main lines of his argument—left Hume bitterly disappointed.

Between 1739 and 1745 Hume lived at Ninewells and began the attempt to make a greater impact on the literary world than the Treatise had produced. In 1741 and 1742 two volumes of Essays, Moral and Political appeared. These met with some success and in 1745 Hume applied unsuccessfully for the chair of Physical and Pneumatical Philosophy at Edinburgh University. His irreligious reputation was the cause of his failure to be appointed, and the controversy caused him to publish another anonymous pamphlet ‘A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh’, in which he defended himself against the charge of irreligion in a way that it is hard now not to see as disingenuous.

In 1745 Hume took up a post as tutor to the mad Marquess of Annandale. He spent a year in the post but was dismissed in 1746. He then acted as secretary to General St Clair, one of his relations, during two missions, one which was supposed to be a raid on the French in Canada but was downgraded to an abortive raid on the coast of France, and a second which took him to Vienna and Turin.

This period from 1745 to 1748 at least aided Hume’s financial position and also gave him the time to rework the material of the Treatise into what he hoped would be a more accessible form. In 1748 thePhilosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (later called An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) appeared, under Hume’s own name. This was a rewriting of Book 1 of the Treatise, in a more elegant form, with significant omissions and one significant addition (Section 10, ‘Of Miracles’, which probably contained material originally intended for the Treatise but was excised when Hume hoped to gain the recommendation of Bishop Butler).

In 1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume’s revision of Book 3 of the Treatise, was published; the work which he described as incomparably the best of his writings. He also published Three Essays Moral and Political (1748) and Political Discourses (1752). In 1752 he again failed to secure a university appointment, being rejected for the Chair of Logic at the University of Glasgow. However, in the same year he was appointed to the post of Keeper of the Advocates’ Library, a post in which he remained until 1757 and which provided him with the resources and opportunity to embark on his six-volume History of England, published in parts in 1754, 1756, 1759 and 1762. This, above all, established his literary reputation and ensured that he was better known in his time as ‘David Hume, historian’ than ‘David Hume, philosopher’. During this time Hume also wrote the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (the main target of which was the teleological argument for God’s existence), which he did not publish in his lifetime, presumably out of a concern not to add to his irreligious reputation, and the Natural History of Religion, which he did publish in 1757 (as part of his controversial Four Dissertations) though he can hardly have thought its approach would endear him to the religious authorities. In the same year, Hume resigned the post of Keeper of the Advocates’ Library, having been found guilty of ordering indecent books (one of which was the Contes of La Fontaine) and unworthy of a place in a learned library.

In 1763 he went to Paris, as private secretary to Lord Hertford, the British ambassador. He was lionized by the French literary establishment, was a favourite of the fashionable ladies and developed friendships with Diderot, D’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvetius, Buffon and (unfortunately for Hume) Rousseau. On Hume’s return to England in 1766, Rousseau (who was fleeing from persecution in Switzerland) accompanied him. Later Hume was forced to defendhimself in print against Rousseau’s unjust accusations arising out of the relationship between them at this time.

Between 1767 and 1769 Hume was Under-Secretary of State, Northern Department, and from then until his death lived with his sister Katherine in Edinburgh. During these years he corrected his History for new editions, and continued to work on his Dialogues. His philosophical work had now attracted sufficient attention for him to be abusively attacked by James Beattie, a pupil of Thomas Reid (1710–96), whose work was successful enough to drive Hume to a public disowning of the Treatise as a ‘juvenile work’ and to an insistence that only the Enquiries should be regarded as expressing his opinions. Later philosophers, of greater perception than Beattie, have appreciated that to follow Hume’s advice would be to ignore a masterpiece.

Finally, on his deathbed, Hume composed his brief autobiography ‘My Own Life’, published in 1777. In this, his final word on the matter, he refers to the lack of success of the Treatise as ‘proceeding more from the manner than the matter’ (1993b:352). He died from bowel cancer in 1776, at peace and (as he says in his autobiography) ‘detached from life’, considering that ‘a man of sixty five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities’. His only expressed regret was that he could not now live to enjoy his growing literary fame (1993b:356).

The structure of Book 1 of the Treatise and its place in Hume’s work

Hume describes his intention in writing A Treatise of Human Nature in the subtitle as ‘An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into Moral Subjects’. Here ‘Moral’ is used in its wide eighteenth-century sense of ‘pertaining to what is specifically human’; in the ‘Advertisement’ to Books 1 and 2, at the beginning of the Treatise, he writes:

My design in the present work is sufficiently explained in the introduction. The reader must only observe, that all the subjects I have planned out to my self, are not treated of in these two volumes. Thesubjects of the understanding and passions make a complete chain of reasoning by themselves; and I was willing to take advantage of this natural division in order to try the taste of the public. If I have the good fortune to meet with success, I shall proceed to the examination of morals, politics and criticism; which will compleat this Treatise of human nature.

Hume thus intended a five-volume work, in which the experimental method of reasoning would be applied successively to the five aspects of human nature comprised in the subjects of the understanding, the passions, morals (in the narrower and still current sense), politics and criticism. But the work as we have it is in fact divided into three books: on the understanding, on passions and on morals. The public reception of the Treatise not being what Hume had hoped for, he abandoned his original plan and, as we have seen, attempted to gain a literary reputation by other means.

Book 1, ‘Of the Understanding’, is the most intensively studied and (as is generally acknowledged) the most difficult and intellectually ambitious of all Hume’s writings. It is concerned with the origin of our ‘ideas’, the material of our thoughts, and the character and limitations of our intellectual activity. It is divided into four parts and each part into sections.

In Part I Hume introduces the basic vocabulary and principles he will be appealing to throughout the rest of his work. His exposition is brief and can seem fairly casual. But this is because he takes himself in the main to be going over ground which will be familiar to his readers and already adequately covered by John Locke. He does not merely follow Locke, however. He begins with a terminological innovation, introducing the term ‘perception’ to denote the basic elements of his system, the items which are ‘before the mind’ whenever any mental activity is going on. He divides perceptions into ‘impressions’ (corresponding to feeling or experience) and ‘ideas’ (corresponding to thinking). He also distinguishes between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ perceptions. With this terminological apparatus in hand, Hume is then able to formulate the most fundamental principle of his system: the so-called Copy Principle, the principle that every simple idea must be a copy of (that is, must resemble and be causally derived from) asimple impression. It is this that defines him as an empiricist. It states a limit, or rather two limits, on what can be thought. First, that whatever can be thought of must be in some sense encounterable in experience (for ideas, the elements of thought, must resemble impressions, the elements of feeling) and, second, that thought can only be of that which has already been encountered in experience, or is in some sense constructible out of what has already been encountered in experience (since simple ideas must be the effects of simple impressions and causation runs from earlier to later). The Copy Principle thus sets Hume a task and provides him with an intellectual weapon. The task is to account for all the ideas that we have in a way that is consistent with it. The role of the Copy Principle as a weapon is described by Hume himself in the ‘Abstract’ of the Treatise:

when he [Hume] suspects that any philosophical term has no idea annexed to it (as is too common) he always asks from what impression that pretended idea is derived? And if no impression can be produced, he concludes that the term is altogether insignificant.

(1978:649)

The role of the Copy Principle in the Treatise is thus a complex one: Hume’s acceptance of it constrains him to search for an account of the origin of such important, yet (in his view) problematic, ideas as space, time, identity, external existence, necessary connection and the self, but enables him to reject philosophical accounts of these ideas which do not conform to the Copy Principle (as is the case, for example, with the account of the self as a simple substance with which all of us are immediately acquainted in our own experience). A second division within the class of perceptions which Hume draws in Part I is that between perceptions ‘of sensation’ and perceptions ‘of reflection’. This division is again drawn from Locke and does not loom large in Part I, and one might be tempted to dismiss it as an unnecessary piece of intellectual jumble. But its significance for Hume becomes clear in Part III, where it turns out to be a crucial component in his account of the origin of the idea of necessary connection—in fact, the idea of necessary connection turns out to be an idea of reflection.

Another division Hume makes in Part I is that between ideas that are general, or abstract, and those that are particular. Again this is a division made by Locke, but Hume rejects Locke’s account of abstract ideas and endorses and elaborates instead that of Berkeley, according to which ‘all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive sig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Hume’s Life and Work
• Chapter 2: Hume’s Theory of the Mind
• Chapter 3: Causation, Induction and Necessary Connection
• Chapter 4: The External World
• Chapter 5: The Self and Personal Identity
• Bibliography