Enlightenment
David Hume
1711–1776
“It is only from the selfishness and confined generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.”
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the eighteenth century. In and he traces ideas to impressions and finds no impression of necessary connection between cause and effect. Constant conjunction and the mind's habit of expectation stand in for the necessity we project onto things. Induction rests on custom, not demonstration. In the he presses the same severity on design arguments. Kant said Hume woke him from dogmatic slumber. Empirical knowledge and natural theology still answer his questions.
In the Conversation
42 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Justice
Justice is an artificial virtue: a human convention arising from the utility of stable rules.
Virtue and Vice
Virtue is what produces approval in an impartial observer: a quality pleasing or useful to self or others.
Emotion
Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions; moral distinctions derive from sentiment, not reason.
Habit
Custom, not reason, is the great guide of human life — habit is the foundation of our beliefs about the world, not merely our conduct in it.
Custom and Convention
Custom is the great guide of human life; habit, not reason, governs both belief and moral practice.
Theology & Metaphysics
God
Natural theology fails. The arguments for God's existence do not survive skeptical scrutiny.
Soul
The 'self' is nothing but a bundle of perceptions; there is no underlying soul-substance.
Cause
We never observe causation, only constant conjunction, and the mind's habit of expecting one thing after another.
Religion
The design argument is inconclusive, miracles defy credibility, and religion originates in human fear and ignorance rather than rational demonstration.
Theology
Natural theology is an illusion: no argument from reason or experience can establish the nature of God.
Metaphysics
Chance
Chance is nothing in itself; it is the name we give to causes we have not yet discovered, measured by probability.
Change
We observe succession and constant conjunction; we never observe the power by which one change produces another.
Necessity and Contingency
We never perceive necessary connection; 'necessity' is only the mind's felt custom of expecting one event after another.
One and Many
Every perception is a distinct existence; the unity we think we find is only the mind's habit of connection.
Relation
All objects of human reason reduce to seven philosophical relations, and the most important of these, causation, turns out to rest on nothing more than custom and constant conjunction.
Same and Other
Personal identity is a fiction of the imagination; the self is a bundle of perceptions with no underlying substance to hold it together.
Quality
We have no basis for distinguishing what is truly in objects from what is in us; the line between primary and secondary qualities cannot be drawn.
Epistemology
Truth
Truth divides: relations of ideas are demonstrable; matters of fact are known only by experience.
Knowledge
All ideas derive from impressions. Causation is merely constant conjunction, known only by habit.
Mind
The mind is a bundle of perceptions: there is no self beneath them, only a habit of association.
Experience
Experience is limited to impressions and ideas; causation is custom, not reason, and we cannot go beyond experience to know necessary connections.
Will
The will is merely the impression we feel when we knowingly produce a new action; liberty and necessity are perfectly compatible.
Language
Abstract ideas are particular ideas attached to general terms; language creates the illusion of abstract thought.
Memory and Imagination
Memory preserves the order and position of ideas; imagination is free to transpose and combine them; the difference is one of vivacity.
Rhetoric
Eloquence moves men through sentiment; the passions, not reason, determine action.
Opinion
All belief about the world is custom-generated opinion, not knowledge; reason alone can tell us nothing about matters of fact, and even our most basic convictions about causation rest on habit rather than evidence.
Idea
Ideas are faint copies of vivid impressions; all genuine ideas trace back to sense experience, and those that do not are meaningless.
Judgment
Belief is a lively idea associated with a present impression; judgment is not an act of reason but a sentiment of the mind.
Hypothesis
The uniformity of nature is the grandest hypothesis of all, and it is one that reason alone can never establish.
Logic & Method
Principle
The principle of cause and effect is grounded in habit, not reason; no necessary connection can be observed or demonstrated.
Reasoning
All reasoning about matters of fact rests on the relation of cause and effect, and that relation is grounded in habit, not logic.
Logic
The laws of logic govern formal inference; the laws of association describe how the mind actually moves — neither can establish the factual conclusions that reason seeks.
Induction
Induction has no rational foundation: the inference from observed to unobserved cases is grounded in habit and custom, not in reason — and no justification for it has ever been given or can be given.
Definition
To define a concept, trace it to the impressions it comes from; any concept that cannot be traced to experience is a confusion masquerading as an idea.
Universal and Particular
General terms are attached to particular ideas by custom; resemblance among particulars, stored as a habit in the mind, does the work that abstract ideas were invented to do.
Science
The only genuine science is either mathematics or experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact; anything that passes neither test deserves to be committed to the flames.