Hume

Harold W. Noonan

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781780744834
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The father of modern scepticism and perhaps the most important English philosopher, Hume was lauded within his own lifetime as a pivotal figure of the Enlightenment, with his highly original theories of perception, personal identity, causation, politics, morality, and religion. Hume's voice, lucid and witty, is still an acute critic of human nature and Western thought.

Chapter One

Introduction: Hume’s life and work

Hume’s life and times

David Hume, the great British philosopher, was born in Edinburgh on 26 April 1711, into a family of strict Presbyterian gentry. He was educated at Edinburgh University, where he acquired grounding in the classical authors, logic and metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics and mathematics.

In his brief autobiography ‘My Own Life’ (Hume 1993b: 351–6) he describes this period:

I ... was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life. ... My studious disposition ... 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 pouring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly devouring.

(Hume 1993b: 351)

In 1729 Hume embarked upon the philosophical study that was to lead to his writing of his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature: An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (Hume 1978). In his 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.

In the hope that a period of alternative employment would enable him to resume his philosophical studies with renewed vigour Hume took up, in 1734, a post as a merchant’s clerk in Bristol, but he soon left for France to continue study and writing. There he lived first at Rheims and then at La Fléche, which contained the Jesuit college in which Descartes had been educated. There, by 1737, he completed the Treatise.

The Treatise was published anonymously, with Books I and II appearing in 1739, and Book III following in 1740 along with an Appendix which contained some corrections to and modifications of his already published material.

Its reception disappointed Hume. It ‘fell dead-born from the press’, he wrote, rather inaccurately (Hume 1993a: 352). Its largely hostile and uncomprehending reception, on which Hume’s anonymous publication of his own Abstract in 1740 had no effect, left Hume permanently regretful of his haste in publishing so young.

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 this charge.

In 1748 the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later called An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, appeared under Hume’s own name. This was a rewriting of Book I of the Treatise, in a more elegant form, with significant omissions, and one significant addition (section X, ‘Of Miracles’, which probably contained material originally intended for the Treatise but excised when Hume thought to gain the recommendation of Bishop Butler).

In 1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume’s revision of Book III of the Treatise, was published. 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, he was appointed to the post of keeper of the Advocates’ Library, where 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. During this time Hume also wrote the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (the main target of which was the argument from design for the existence of God), 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.

From 1763 to 1766, in Paris, as private secretary to the British ambassador, Hume 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, fleeing from persecution in Switzerland, accompanied him. Later Hume was forced to defend himself in print against Rousseau’s unjust accusations about their relationship.

After 1767 until his death he corrected his History for new editions, and continued to work on his Dialogues. His philosophical work was now sufficiently known for him to be abusively attacked by James Beattie, a pupil of Thomas Reid (1710–1796), whose work was successful enough to drive Hume to a public disowning of the Treatise as a ‘juvenile work’, and an insistence that only the Enquiries should be regarded as expressing his opinions.

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’ (Hume 1993b: 352).

Hume died 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 (Hume 1993b: 356).

Themes and Arguments in Hume’s philosophy

The subtitle of the Treatise of Human Nature is ‘An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into Moral Subjects’. In fact, Hume intended a five-volume work, applying the experimental method of reasoning successively to the five ‘moral subjects’, or aspects of human nature, comprised in the subjects of the understanding, the passions, morals (in the modern narrower 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. Disappointed by the public reception of the Treatise, Hume abandoned his original plan, and attempted to gain a literary reputation by other means.

Book I, ‘Of the Understanding’, is 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.

In Part I Hume introduces the basic vocabulary and principles he will be appealing to throughout the rest of his work. He begins with a terminological innovation, introducing the term ‘perception’ to denote the basic elements of his system, the items that 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 Hume then formulates 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, a simple impression. It is this that defines him as an empiricist. 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 does not loom large in Part I, but its significance becomes clear in Part III, where it turns out to be a crucial component in Hume’s 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. The distinction is also of fundamental importance in Books II and III, whose subject matter, the passions and moral sentiments, are impressions of reflection.

Another division in Part I is that between ideas that are general, or abstract, and those that are particular. This is a division previously made by Hume’s empiricist predecessor, John Locke, but Hume rejects Locke’s account of abstract ideas and endorses and elaborates instead Bishop Berkeley’s, according to which ‘all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them’ (1978: 18). Hume ranks Berkeley’s theory very highly. Its significance for him is that it turns out that the only way he is able to account for our ideas of space, time, existence and causation is as Berkeleian abstract ideas.

Three other fundamental elements of Hume’s philosophy are introduced in Part I. The first is the Separability Principle: ‘Whatever objects are different are distinguishable, and whatever objects are distinguishable are separable by the thought and imagination’ (Hume 1978: 18).

The second is the Conceivability Principle:‘Whatever is clearly conceiv’d may exist, and whatever is clearly conceiv’d, after any manner, may exist after the same manner’ (Hume 1978: 233). Or, more briefly: ‘Nothing of which we can form a clear and distinct idea is absurd and impossible’ (Hume 1978: 19).

Together these principles imply that if any objects are distinct they can exist separately – either can exist without the other. And it is this consequence Hume appeals to in rejecting the possibility of real connections between distinct existences, which rejection in turn underpins his rejection of necessary connections between causes and effects, his rejection of the notion of substance (except as applicable universally to anything that can be conceived) and his rejection of a simple self distinct from its perceptions. In some commentary (Wright 1983, Strawson 1989) Hume has been described as a ‘sceptical realist’, whose scepticism is in fact limited to our possession of positively contentful ideas of these things, but who does not deny their existence in the world. This is inconsistent with the role of the Separability Principle (understood as a principle about the distinctness of objects, as opposed to ideas) just outlined (for further discussion see the third chapter of this volume and Bennett 2001).

The final fundamental element of Hume’s thought introduced in Part I is his statement of his three principles of the association of ideas: resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect, which, he believes, account for the order in which our ideas follow one another in our minds, and are also involved in the explanation of our coming to have beliefs in matters of fact beyond our memory and senses and in the origin of the problematic ideas already mentioned.

In Part II of Book I Hume attempts to provide an account of the ideas of space and time and also discusses the ideas of existence and external existence.

His account of the ideas of space and time is as abstract ideas, derived from the ‘manners of appearance’ in which our perceptions array themselves in spatial and temporal relations (Hume 1978: 35). Of these ideas, that of time is of vital importance in Hume’s later account of identity as a fiction of the imagination, which in turn is employed both in his account in Part IV of our belief in an external world and in his account of our belief in an enduring self.

The other important discussion in Part II is Hume’s account of our ideas of existence and external existence, that is, existence independent of the mind. The former Hume identifies as an abstract idea, so that the idea of existence ‘when conjoined with the idea of any object makes no addition to it’ (Hume 1978: 67). Hume’s account of external existence in Part II anticipates his extended discussion in Part IV, to which he refers the reader. Here, he insists that we can have no idea of anything ‘specifically different from’ (Hume 1978: 67), that is, wholly unlike, ideas and impressions, and propounds his dictum: ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see, all this is nothing but to perceive’ (Hume 1978: 67).

This hints (by the use of the transitive verb ‘perceive’) at a central feature of his position, namely, his reification of perception.

Part III of Book I, ‘Of knowledge and probability’, is also of fundamental importance to Hume’s philosophy. Its topic is the explanation of our belief in the existence of a world extended beyond our senses and memory. Because of the way he approaches this topic Hume is led into a discussion of the notion of cause and effect and the resultant Humean account of causation has remained a paradigm of philosophical analysis ever since. Its fundamental contention is that though the idea of necessary connection is an essential component of our idea of the cause–effect relation, there is no necessary connection between the things we call causes and effects themselves. The idea of necessary connection is, in fact, copied from a feeling that arises when a transition is made in thought from the idea, or impression, of the cause to the idea of the effect. Our mistaken belief that causes and effects are themselves necessarily connected is a ‘fiction of the imagination’, which results from the mind’s ‘propensity to spread itself on external objects’ (Hume 1978: 167).

Our belief that every event must have a cause is to be explained similarly, Hume asserts. It is not in fact a necessary truth that every event has a cause.

Part III is also notable for what has traditionally been taken to be the formulation by Hume, in section VI, of what has come to be known as ‘the Problem of Induction’. When we infer to the unobserved from the observed, as when we infer from the past to the future, is our procedure rationally justified, in the sense that our beliefs about the observed provide us with evidence for our beliefs about the unobserved? Whether Hume does pose this question in section VI, and, if so, whether he answers it, are questions that have been much debated amongst Hume scholars. The question Hume himself formulates is ‘Whether we are determined by reason to make the transition [from an observed cause to its effect], or by a certain association and relation of perceptions?’ (Hume 1978: 88–9).

His answer is emphatic:

Not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connection of causes and effects, but even after experience has informed us of their constant conjunction, ’tis impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we should extend that experience beyond those particular instances which have fallen under our observation.

(Hume 1978: 91–2)

The traditional interpretation of this in the mid-twentieth century, originating perhaps with Russell (1912) (see also Flew 1961, Stove 1965, Bennett 1971, Stroud 1977) was that Hume is here expressing scepticism about induction. As Stroud states what he takes to be Hume’s conclusion: ‘Past and present experiences give us no ... reason at all to believe anything about the unobserved ... As far as the competition for degrees of reasonableness is concerned, all possible beliefs about the unobserved are tied for last place’ (Hume 1977: 52–4).

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Hume scholarship since the publication of Stroud’s book has been the refutation of this reading of Hume (see Broughton 1983; Beauchamp and Rosenberg 1981; Cannon 1979; Baier 1991; Loeb 1991, 1995a, b, 2002; Garrett 1997, 2005; Owen 1999). It has become clear as a result of the work of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Hume’s life and work
• 2 Hume’s theory of the mind
• 3 Causation, induction and necessary connection
• 4 The external world
• 5 The self and personal identity
• 6 Morality
• 7 Religion
• Bibliography
• Index