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Now read Book I, Part IV, Sections I-IV (inclusive) of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. Use any edition that you like, but make sure that your text is complete and unabridged. The number of pages is small because I expect you to read them carefully even if it is a bit of a struggle. When you are finished, try to answer the following questions.

Questions

1. How does Hume describe the limits of scientific and philosophical knowledge?

2. What are the main criteria of scientific proof?

3. Why is experience as important as “solid sense”?

4. What’s the difference between scientific knowledge and natural understanding? To which area does Hume want to apply the rules of skepticism?

5. What happens to knowledge, as it gets more abstract and remote from sense experience?

6. How does Hume define his philosophic agenda?

7. What does Hume say is the main problem facing him in pursuing this agenda?

8. What is the source of all knowledge? What do we do with that knowledge?

9. What is the difference between the vulgar and the scientific understanding of external objects?

10. What does Hume have to say about the so-called superiority of scientific understanding? What’s missing from the scientific equation?

11. What characteristics we attach to external objects before we can believe in their objective existence?

12. What does constancy depend upon? Why is this a problem?

13. Why does Hume suggest that the qualities of constancy and coherence are trustworthier than cause and effect?

14. Why are the vulgar understanding authoritative and the scientific/philosophical understanding derivative? How do we achieve balance or ease between the natural and the scientific understanding of reality?

15. What do philosophers do when they leave their study or “closets” and “mingle with the rest of mankind?”

16. Ultimately, what do external objects and even the concept of the self boil down to?

17. What is most absurd about philosophical and scientific speculation?

18. What is the self and why is it a problem?

19. Why is cause and effect a problem?

20. Ultimately, what is this thing called cause and effect? How does it operate in traditional philosophical systems

21. What does Hume compare most modern philosophical and scientific systems to?

Suggested Answers

1. The best this knowledge can ever be is probable, because it depends on human understanding that can be faulty and even deceitful.

2. Proof typical depends on the addition of new probabilities that are linked “by the union of causes and effects, according to past experience and observation.”

3. Human experience shows us that many errors have been made in the past and should show us that we need to be careful about our predictions for the future.

4. We can’t stop ourselves from organizing our experience in natural ways in everyday life. Science, however, requires us to organize that experience according to strict logic. Skepticism and rationalism only apply to our scientific understanding. Hume points out that he is not a skeptic when it comes to nature.

5. It becomes increasingly less probable.

6. He says that he wants to show us how it is that we come to have a certain belief in our knowledge in common life. He also wants to know how the imagination works. Finally, he wants to show how our conviction, “which arises from a subtle reasoning, diminishes in proportion to the effort which the imagination makes to enter into the reasoning and to conceive it in all its parts.”

7. He says that he has to use reason (“take shelter under her protection”) to demonstrate the limits of reason. Rational skepticism is a method for correcting the dogmatisms in science and philosophy. This is a process of demolition that should not interfere with our natural tendency to return to a common sense understanding at the end of the process.

8. All knowledge comes from sense impressions. By making links with our reason and our imagination, we build these sense impressions into a world of distinct and external objects and selves, including our won. This process may be automatic but it is no means simple. The senses alone cannot create these notions so we have to explore the human mind to see how they come about.

9. Philosophers and scientists generally believe that objects have motion and extension and other qualities that are amendable to rational manipulation. They devalue other sense-derived information such as colours, tastes, smells, sounds and heat and cold because these are too changeable and so obviously dependent on the senses. The vulgar regard both these primary and secondary qualities as equally real. Hume suggests that the so-called primary qualities of external objects or matter are equally suspect.

10. Scientific information is also dependent upon the senses. Even to appreciate the continuing existence of an external object or a self, we need to exercise our imaginations. Reason clearly is incapable of the work that is attributed to it.

11. We need to view them as constant (continuing), coherent (regular in appearance), and governed by cause and effect.

12. Constancy depends on two things – memory and belief. We must remember features from the past, but we also must have a belief in continued existence. The latter can only be accomplished by a leap of imagination. The problem here is there is absolutely nothing that proves that an object continues once it is removed from our perception.

13. Philosophical systems based on cause and effect move way too far from the original perceptions that strike the mind. Also they are too independent of the most natural characteristic operations of the mind, memory and imagination. Cause and effect have “no primary recommendation to reason or the imagination.

14. At least the vulgar understanding in natural to us as human beings. Philosophical and scientific systems are increasingly artificial. The farther the latter move away from the former, the less trustworthy they are. Hume puts it nicely when he says “Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attacked by reason…Not being able to reconcile these two enemies, we endeavour to set ourselves at ease as much as possible, by successively granting to each whatever it demands, and by feigning a double existence, where each may find something, that has all the conditions it desires.”

15. They revert to the vulgar system.

16. They are fanciful illusions that may be necessary for daily life. But these fictions are not strong enough to build complex philosophical or scientific systems on.

17. The absurdity is philosophers and scientists arbitrarily “invent a new set of perceptions” which they artificially deem superior to ordinary perceptions. Their confidence in these “extraordinary” abstractions is patently groundless and we shouldn’t put much faith in them.

18. The self is a contradiction in terms. Our perceptions are many and are constantly changing. We move further away from knowledge as we jumble and combine perceptions and negate their original simplicity. The self is a complex and capricious jumble of perceptions linked together by cause and effect.

19. Not only is it impossible to discover the necessary connection that would legitimize the concept of cause and effect, because the power or agency needed is never discovered. But also cause and effect arguments lead by succession to other causes and effects and end up in something that Hume calls unintelligible – “a substance, or original and first matter”.

20. It is a customary habit that makes us “infer a connection between cause and effect”. Hume calls it the “custom of imagining a dependence” when, in reality, we cannot logically connect our sensations in this way. While this is not a problem in everyday life, it became absurd when the ancient philosophers pushed these “fictions” so far that they discover what Hume calls “occult qualities” that they shaped into “incomprehensible systems”.

21. Modern philosophy resembles Greek legends and poetic fantasies. Products almost entirely created by the imagination. The moderns make the mistake of thinking that their notions of matter, motion, extension etc. have a greater reality than other perceived qualities.