Hume Sentence Examples

Apart from his pertinacious fight for economy Hume was not always fortunate in his political activity.

Horace Walpole, who gives an unfavourable picture of his private character, acknowledges that Stone possessed "abilities seldom to be matched"; and he had the distinction of being mentioned by David Hume as one of the only two men of mark who had perceived merit in that author's History of England on its first appearance.

He published works on Leibnitz, empiricism and scepticism in Hume's philosophy, modern pessimism, Kantic criticism, English philosophy, Heraclitus of Ephesus and many other subjects.

It is a Treatise on Trigonometry, by a Scotsman, James Hume of Godscroft, Berwickshire, a place still in possession of the family of Hume.

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Herbert Spencer are not systematic materialists, but show tendencies towards materialism.

The application of "common sense" to the problem of substance supplied a more satisfactory analytic for him than the scepticism of Hume which reached him through a study of Kant.

The Scottish philosophy of Thomas Reid and his successors believed that David Hume's scepticism was no more than the genuine outcome of Locke's sensationalist appeal to experience when ripened or forced on by the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley - God and the soul alone; not God, world and soul.

This is Reid's first reply to Hume.

Hegel offers a supposed proof that Time and Space, Matter, Nature, are ascertainable and definable 2 This is Kant's positive refutation of Hume's scepticism.

His reply to Hume was this - Mechanical causation is as real as the unity of consciousness.

On one side; another battery of Kant's was aimed against Hume.

Scepticism, with which P. Bayle had played as a historian - he amused himself, too, with praising the Manichaean solution of the riddle of the universe - became a serious power in the history of philosophy with the advent of David Hume.

Still, it may be doubted how far Hume was in earnest.

Even in that book Hume is able to play with sceptical solutions.

Popular scepticism - perhaps even Charles Darwin's; Huxley himself was a student of Hume - understands by agnosticism that science is certain while philosophy and theology are baseless.

We refer to David Hume.

Hume, p. 68, she was his mistress.

Much as he admired these writers, Hume and Robertson were still greater favourites, as well from their subject as for their style.

Of his admiration of Hume's style, of its nameless grace of simple elegance, he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.

It never got beyond that rehearsal; Hume, indeed, approved of the performance, only deprecating as unwise the author's preference for French; but Gibbon sided with the majority.

It is interesting, however, to know, that in the first volume is a review by Gibbon of Lord Lyttelton's History of Henry II., and that the second volume contains a contribution by Hume on Walpole's Historic Doubts.

The publication of Hume's treatise turned his attention to philosophy, and in particular to the theory of external perception.

Many of the subjects of discussion were drawn from Hume's speculations; and during the last years of his stay in Aberdeen Reid propounded his new point of view in several papers read before the society.

The key to Reid's philosophy is to be found in his revulsion from the sceptical conclusions of Hume.

But Reid's actions are better than his words; his real mode of procedure is to redargue Hume's conclusions by a refutation of the premises inherited by him from his predecessors.

In the substance of their answer to Hume, the two philosophers have therefore much in common.

He had also read a great deal of history in English - Robertson's histories, Hume, Gibbon, Robert Watson's Philip II.

Hume's empiricism, combined with a belief in biological evolution (derived from Herbert Spencer), was the chief feature in English thought during the third quarter of the 10th century.

Locke and Hume held that the work of the mind was eo ipso unreal because it was "made by" man and not "given to" man.

Hume maintains that no evidence, such as is available, can make a miracle credible.

But slavery, as Hume has shown, is unfavourable to population.

In 1846 he achieved high reputation by his Life of David Hume, based upon extensive and unused MS. material.

It was his great good fortune to find abundant unused material for his Life of Hume, and to be the first to introduce the principles of historical research into the history of Scotland.

David Hume summed up his admiration for Douglas by saying that his friend possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one and licentiousness of the other."

Voltaire published his Le Cafe, ou l'Ecossaise (1760), Londres (really Geneva), as a translation from the work of Mr Hume, described as Pasteur de l'eglise d'Edimbourg, but Home seems to have taken no notice of the mystification.

From the date of his re-entering the House Hume became the self-elected guardian of the public purse, by challenging and bringing to a direct vote every single item of public expenditure.

A Memorial of Hume was published by his son Joseph Burnley Hume (London, 1855).

In the words of Hume, "they seem conjoined but never connected."

To the three named should be added the Calton burying-ground, with its Roman tomb of David Hume, and the obelisk raised in 1844 to the memory of Maurice Margarot, Thomas Muir (1765-1798), Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747-1802), William Skirving and Joseph Gerrald (1765-1796), the political martyrs transported towards the end of the 18th century for advocating parliamentary reform.

In January 1757 he succeeded David Hume as librarian to the faculty of advocates, but soon relinquished this office on becoming tutor in the family of Lord Bute.

By this principle Ferguson endeavours to reconcile all moral systems. With Hobbes and Hume he admits the power of self-interest or utility, and makes it enter into morals as the law of self-preservation.

His contemporaries, with the exception of Hume, regarded his writings as of great importance; in point of fact they are superficial.

About 1759 Bryan went to Jamaica, and joined his uncle, who engaged a private tutor to complete his education, and when Bayly died his nephew inherited his wealth, succeeding also in 1773 to the estate of another Jamaica resident named Hume.

By his wife, Martha, daughter of Thomas Phipps of Westbury, he left an only son, Hume.

When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light.

To Kant's lectures and conversations he further owed something of his large interest in cosmological and anthropological problems. Among the writers whom he most carefully read were Plato, Hume, Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, Diderot and Rousseau.

Thus with respect to early religious beliefs he rejected Hume's notion that religion sprang out of the fears of primitive men, in favour of the theory that it represents the first attempts of our species to explain phenomena.

In the session of 1834 his most important performance was a speech in opposition to Hume's proposal to throw the universities open to Dissenters.

In 1744 he settled finally at Battersea with his friend Hugh Hume, 3rd earl of Marchmont, and was present at Pope's death in May.

His ethical system was reproduced, though in a more precise and philosophical form, by Hutcheson, and from him descended, with certain variations, to Hume and Adam Smith.

Carlyle's memory recalled the Porteous Riots of 1736, and less remotely his friendship with Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Home, the dramatist, for witnessing the performance of whose tragedy Douglas He Was Censured In 1757.

Philip II., by Martin Hume (London, 1897), is more just in its treatment of Philip's personal character, and gives a useful bibliography.

During this sojourn of five years in England he had made many valuable friends outside of court and political circles, among whom Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith were conspicuous.

He knew Kames, Hume and Adam Smith, and corresponded with Mirabeau, " the friend of Man."

The implications of such a view were first clearly apparent when Hume showed that on the basis of it there seemed to be nothing that we could confidently affirm except the order of our own impressions and ideas.

It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing criticism of the basis of knowledge the substance of which is summed up in his celebrated Refuta tion of Idealism,' wherein he sought to undermine Hume's scepticism by carrying it one step further and demonstrating that not only is all knowledge of self or object excluded, but the consciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself impossible except in relation to some external permanent and universally accepted world of objects.

But finally David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in England, and he accepted.

When, after not a few displays of his strange humour, he professed himself tired of the capital, 23 Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr Davenport at Wootton in Derbyshire.

Finally he quarrelled with Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own friends and Rousseau's supposed enemies of the philosophe circle to be rascals.

Only excuses can be made for him; but the excuses for a man born, as Hume after the quarrel said of him, "without a skin" are numerous and strong.

Masaryk, who, as a counterpoise to German speculation and the intellectualism of Herbart, emphasized the critical study of English philosophy, notably Hume, Spencer and Mill, and the French Comte; at the same time he fully appreciated the value of Kant in epistemology.

Even Hume, in various passages of his Treatise, speaks of himself as recovering cheerfulness and mental tone only by forgetfulness of his own arguments.

It may be doubted whether the thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism of antiquity has any exact parallel in modern times, with the single exception possibly of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.

Hume is the most illustrious and indeed the typical sceptic of modern times.

But it is essential to the sceptical position that reason be dethroned within experience as well as beyond it, and this is undoubtedly the result at which Hume finally arrives.

The Treatise is a reductio ad absurdum of the principles of Lockianism, inasmuch as these principles, when consistently applied, leave the structure of experience entirely " loosened " (to use Hume's own expression), or cemented together only by the irrational force of custom.

Hume's scepticism thus really arises from his thoroughgoing empiricism.

Hume's analysis of the conceptions of a permanent world and a permanent self reduces us to the sensationalistic relativism of Protagoras.

All real connexion or relation, therefore, and with it all possibility of an objective system, disappears; it is, in fact, excluded by Hume ab initio, for " the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences."

The progress of thought may show it to be, in truth, relative, as when the nerve of Hume's scepticism is shown to be his thoroughgoing empiricism, or when the scepticism of the Critique of Pure Reason is traced to the unwarrantable assumption of things-in-themselves.

Hume's Great Lord Burghley (1898) is largely a piecing together of the references to Burghley in the same author's Calendar of Simancas MSS.

About this time began his acquaintance with David Hume, which afterwards ripened into friendship. In 1751 he was elected professor of logic at Glasgow, and in 1752 was transferred to the chair of moral philosophy, which had become vacant by the death of Thomas Craigie, the successor of Hutcheson.

He describes himself to Hume during this period as being extremely happy.

That great work appeared in 1776.2 After its publication, and only a few months before his own death, Hume wrote to congratulate his friend - "Euge!

This letter excited some rancour among the theologians, and Dr George Horne, afterwards bishop of Norwich, published in 1777 A Letter to Adam Smith on the Life, Death and Philosophy of his Friend David Hume, by one of the people called Christians.

A similar conclusion seems to follow from a letter of Hume in Burton's Life, ii.

A second objection urged, perhaps with less justice, against the theory is that it fails to account for the made his tour in 1773, whilst Hume's death did not take place till 1776.

It appears, however, from Boswell's Life, under date of 29th April 1778, that Johnson had on one occasion quarrelled with Smith at Strahan's house, apparently in London; it is clear that the "unlucky altercation" at Strahan's must have occurred in 1761 or 1763, and could have had nothing to do with the letter on Hume's death.

But this view, already refuted by Hume, is easily seen to be erroneous.

Additional particulars are given in Brougham's Men of Letters and Science, Burton's Life of Hume and Alexander Carlyle's Autobiography; and some characteristic anecdotes of him will be found in Memoirs of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair (1837).

His refutation of Hume's objection to the truth of miracles is perhaps his intellectual chef-d'ceuvre.

Laas in reality was a disciple of Hume.

He once for all lifted the problem of metaphysics to a higher level, and, in conjunction with his successor, Hume, determined the form into which later metaphysical questions have been thrown.

In 1754 he became deputy librarian for the Faculty of Advocates, by the kindness of Hume.

He was eventually estranged from Hume, and defended James Beattie's attack on that philosopher.

But, in spite of these materialistic tendencies, he followed Hume in reducing matter and everything knowable to phenomena of consciousness; and, supposing that nothing is knowable beyond phenomena, concluded that we can neither affirm nor deny that anything exists beyond, but ought to take up an attitude which the ancient sceptics called Aphasia, but he dubbed by the new name of Agnosticism.

Hume saw that in making all the objects of perception ideas Berkeley had given as little reason for inferring substantial souls as substantial bodies.

Berkeley and Hume produced the English idealism of Mill and Spencer, with their successors, and occasioned the German idealism of Kant.

So far it is in general agreement not only with Hume, but also with Kant in his first two positions.

For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner?

Ernst Mach is a conspicuous instance of a confusion of physics and psychology ending in a scepticism like that of Hume.

He comes near to Hume's substitution of succession of phenomena for real causality.

He holds, like Hume, that nothing is real except our sensations and complexes of sensory elements; that the ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity, but its continuity alone is important; and that we know no real causes at all, much less real causes of our sensations; or, as he expresses it, bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of sensations form bodies.

But he limits this power of mind beyond sensations to mere ideas, and like Hume, and also like Lange, holds at last that, though we may form ideas beyond sensations or phenomena, we cannot know things.

He refers to Hume as recognizing no causality but only a customary and habitual succession, but adds that Kant rightly recognizes that mere observation cannot teach the necessity of the conjunction.

But in reality his theory is neither Hume's theory of association nor Kant's of an a priori notion of understanding under which a given case is subsumed.

But the idealists are only too glad to get any excuse for denying bodily substances and causes; and, while Leibnitz supplied them with the fancied analysis of material into immaterial elements, and Hume with the reduction of bodies to assemblages of sensations, Mach adds the additional argument that bodily forces are not causes at all.

In Great Britain Mach's scepticism was welcomed by Karl Pearson to support an idealistic phenomenalism derived from Hume, and by Ward to support a noumenal idealism derived from Lotze.

This view, however, is held in different forms; and two opposite forms have arisen in Germany, " immanent philosophy " and " empirio-criticism," the former nearer to Kant, the latter to Hume.

Again he agrees with the reaction both to Hume and to Kant in limiting knowledge to mental phenomena, and has affinities with Mach as well as with Lange.

According to him, then, attention, even involuntary attention, requires inner will; and all the functions imputed by Hume to association, as well as those imputed to understanding by Kant, require apperception, and therefore inner will.

So far his psychology is a further development of Hume's.

But he does not agree with Hume that mind is nothing but sensations, ideas, and associations, but with Kant, that there are higher combinations.

In his logic, and especially in his epistemology, Wundt appears as a mediator between Hume and Kant, but with more leaning to the latter.

While he regards association as lying at the basis of all knowledge, he does not think it sufficient, and objects to Hume that he does not account for necessity, nor for substance and causation as known in the sciences.

Between Hume's a posteriori and Kant's a priori hypothesis he proposes a logical theory of the origin of notions beyond experience.

That sense only gives to experience coexistences and sequences of appearances, as Hume said and Kant allowed, is also Wundt's startingpoint.

Not, says Wundt, by association, as Hume said, but by thinking; not, however, by a priori thinking, as Kant said, but by logical thinking, by applying the logical principle of ground and consequent (which Leibnitz had called the principle of sufficient reason) as a causal law to empirical appearances.

The predominant influence, on the whole, has been the phenomenalism of Hume, with its slender store of sensations, ideas and associations, and its conclusion that all we know is sensations without any known thinkers or any other known things.

It is true that Spencer's " transfigured realism" contains much that was not dreamt of by Hume.

He develops this belief in an absolute in connexion with his own theory of evolution into something different both from the idealism of Hume and the realism of Hamilton, and rather falling under the head of materialism.

Nothing could be more like Hume than his final statement that what we are conscious of is subjective affections produced by objective agencies unknown and unknowable.

The " antirealism," which takes the lion's share in " transfigured realism," is simply a development of the phenomenalism of Hume.

Nor is Hume yet dethroned, as we see from the works of Karl Pearson and of William James, who, though an American, has exercised a considerable influence on English thought.

It was counteracted to some extent by the study at the universities of the deductive logic of Aristotle and the inductive logic of Bacon, by parts of Mill's own logic, and by the natural realism of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, which met Hume's scepticism by asserting a direct perception of the external world.

He carries its operation beforereason still farther, supposing that " attuition " makes particular inferences about outside objects, and that a man, or a dog, through association " attuites " sequence and invariableness of succession, and, in fact, gets as far in the direction of causation as Hume thought it possible to go at all.

Lewes (q.v.), starting from the phenomenalism of Hume, fell under the spell of Kant and his successors, and produced a compromise between G.H.Lewes.

Nothing can be more curious than the way in which a school of English philosophers, which originally started from Hume, the most sceptical of phenomenalists, thus gradually passed over to Leibnitz and Fechner, the originators of panpsychistic noumenalism.

Karl Pearson (The Grammar of Science, 1892, 2nd enlarged ed., 1900), starting from Hume's phenomenal idealism, has developed views closely allied to Mach's universal physical phenomenology.

What Hume called repeated sequence Pearson calls " routine " of perceptions, and, like his master, holds that cause is an antecedent stage in a routine of perceptions; while he also acknowledges that his account of matter leads him very near to John Stuart Mill's definition of matter as " a permanent possibility of sensations."

But they may very well have been developed independently in Germany and in England from their common source in Hume.

Their point is to stretch Hume's phenomenalism so as to embrace all science, by contending that mechanism is not at the bottom of phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid of which men of 'science can briefly describe phenomena, and that all science is description and not explanation.

The attack made by David Hume on the causal relation led directly to the new rationalism of Kant, who argued that it was wrong to regard thought as mere analysis.

The fugitives were pursued and beleaguered by the earl of Morton and Lord Hume, who declared their purpose to rescue the queen from the thraldom of her husband.

Of Hume's early education little is known beyond what he has himself stated in his Life.

This brief notice, however, is not sufficient to explain the full significance of the event for Hume's own life.

Hume naturally expected that the world would see as clearly as he did the connexion between the concrete problems agitating contemporary thought and the abstract principles on which their solution depended.

After the publication of the Treatise Hume retired to his brother's house at Ninewells and carried on his studies, mainly in the direction of politics and political economy.

The philosophical relation between Butler and Hume is curious.

So far as analysis of knowledge is concerned they are in harmony, and Hume's sceptical conclusions regarding belief in matters of fact are the foundations on which Butler's defence of religion rests.

Hume had the greatest respect for the author of the Analogy, ranks him with Locke and Berkeley as an originator of the experimental method in moral science, and in his specially theological essays, such as that on Particular Providence and a Future State, has Butler's views specifically in mind.

After a brief sojourn at Ninewells, doubtless occupied in preparing for publication his Philosophical Essays (afterwards entitled An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding), Hume was again associated with General St Clair as secretary in the embassy to Vienna and Turin (1748).

The notes of this journey are written in a light and amusing style, showing Hume's usual keenness of sight in some directions and his almost equal blindness in others.

Some modern critics have accepted this disclaimer as of real value, but in fact it has no significance; and Hume himself in a striking letter to Gilbert Elliott indicated the true relation of the two works.

In 1749 Hume returned to Ninewells, enriched with " near a thousand pounds."

At this time also we hear of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, a work which Hume was prevailed on not to publish, but which he revised with great care, and evidently regarded with the greatest favour.

The work itself, left by Hume with instructions that it should be published, did not appear till 1779.

In 1751 Hume was again unsuccessful in the attempt to gain a professor's chair.

In 1753 Hume was fairly settled in Edinburgh, preparing for his History of England.

It expresses Hume's feelings rather than the real facts.

Nor is there anything in Hume's correspondence to show that the failure of the book was so complete as he declared.

At the same time the bitterness of Hume's feelings and their effect are of importance in his life.

The second volume, published in 1756, carrying on the narrative to the Revolution, was better received than the first; but Hume then resolved to work backwards, and to show from a survey of the Tudor period that his Tory notions were grounded upon the history of the constitution.

The numerous editions of the various portions - for, despite Hume's wrath and grumblings, the book was a great literary success - gave him an opportunity of careful revision, which he employed to remove from it all the ' villainous seditious Whig strokes," and " plaguy prejudices of Whiggism " that he could detect.

The sources at Hume's command were few, and he did not use them all.

It was the first attempt at a comprehensive treatment of historic facts, the first to introduce the social and literary aspects of a nation's life as only second in importance to its political fortunes, and the first historical writing in an animated yet refined and polished style.2 While the History was in process of publication, Hume did not entirely neglect his other lines of activity.

It is remarkable that Hume does not appear to have been acquainted with Spinoza's analysis of the affections.

The last two essays are contributions of no great importance to aesthetics, a department of philosophy in which Hume was not strong.

The Natural History of Religion is a powerful contribution to the deistic controversy; but, as in the case of Hume's earlier work, its significance was at the time overlooked.

Hume endeavours to show that polytheism was the earliest as well as the most natural form of religious belief, and that theism or deism is ' See Burton, ii.

Perhaps our knowledge of Johnson's sentiments regarding the Scots in general, and of his expressions regarding Hume and Smith in particular, may lessen our surprise at this vehemence.

Hume certainly did his utmost to secure for Rousseau a comfortable retreat in England, but his usually sound judgment seems at first to have been quite at fault with regard to his protege.

Hume came well out of the business, and had the sagacity to conclude that his admired friend was little better than a madman.

Hume's cheerful temper, his equanimity, his kindness to literary aspirants and to those whose views differed from his own won him universal respect and affection.

In the spring of 1775 Hume was struck with a tedious and harassing though not painful illness.

In the Treatise of Human Nature, which is in every respect the most complete exposition of Hume's philosophical conception, we have the first thorough-going attempt to apply the fundamental principles of Locke's empirical psychology to the construction of a theory of knowledge, and, as a natural consequence, the first systematic criticism of the chief metaphysical notions from this point of view.

In certain of the later writings, pre-eminently in the Dialogues on Natural Religion, Hume brings the result of his speculative criticism to bear upon the problems of current theological discussion, and gives in their regard, as previously with respect to general philosophy, the final word of the empirical theory in its earlier form.

In the first instance, then, Hume's philosophical work is to be regarded as the attempt to supply for empiricism in psychology a consistent, that is, a logically developed theory of knowledge.

It was left for Hume to approach the theory of knowledge with full consciousness from the psychological point of view, and to work out the final consequences of that view so far as cognition is concerned.

In order to make perfectly clear the full significance of the principle which Hume applied to the solution of the chief philosophical questions, it is necessary to render somewhat more precise and complete the statement of the psychological view Theory which lies at the foundation of the empirical theory, and to distinguish from it the problem of the theory of knowledge upon which it was brought to bear.

Without entering into details, which it is the less necessary to do because the subject has been recently discussed with great fulness in works readily accessible, it may be said that for Locke as for Hume the problem of psychology was the exact description of the contents of the individual mind, and the determination of the conditions of the origin and development of conscious experience in the individual mind.

And the answer to the problem which was furnished by Locke is in effect that with which Hume started.

With Locke, Hume professes to regard this problem as virtually covered or answered by the fundamental psychological theorem; but the superior clearness of his reply enables us to mark with perfect precision the nature of the difficulty inherent in the attempt to regard the two as identical.

The difficulty of reconciling the two views is that which gives rise to much of the obscurity in Locke's treatment of the theory of knowledge; in Hume the effort to identify them, and to explain the synthesis which is essential to cognition as merely the accidental result of external relations among the elements of conscious experience, appears with the utmost clearness, and gives the keynote of all his philosophical work.

The final perplexity, concealed by various forms of expression, comes forward at the close of the Treatise as absolutely unsolved, and leads Hume, as will be pointed out, to a truly remarkable confession of the weakness of his own system.

While, then, the general idea of a theory of knowledge as based upon psychological analysis is the groundwork of the Treatise, it is a particular consequence of this idea that furnishes to Hume the characteristic criterion applied by him to all philosophical questions.

In the first part Hume gives his own statement of the psychological foundations of his theory.

All that appears in conscious experience as primary, as arising from some unknown cause, and therefore relatively as original, Hume designates by the term impression, and claims to imply by such term no theory whatsoever as to the origin of this portion of experience.

By this theory, Hume is freed from all the problems of abstraction and judgment.

Such, in substance, is Hume's restatement of Locke's empirical view.

It remains to be seen how knowledge can be explained on such a basis; but, before proceeding to sketch Hume's answer to this question, it is necessary to draw attention, first, to the peculiar device invariably resorted to by him when any exception to his general principle that ideas are secondary copies of impressions presents itself, and, secondly, to the nature of the substitute offered by him for that perception of relations or synthesis which even in Locke's confused statements had appeared as the essence of cognition.

Whenever Hume finds it impossible to recognize in an idea the mere copy of a particular impression, he introduces the phrase " manner of conceiving."

Such a fashion of disguising difficulties points, not only to an inconsistency in Hume's theory as stated by himself, but to the initial error upon which it proceeds; for these perplexities are but the consequences of the doctrine that cognition is to be explained on the basis of particular perceptions.

These external relations are, in fact, what Hume describes as the natural bonds of connexion among ideas, and, regarded subjectively as principles of association among the facts of mental experience, they form the substitute he offers for the synthesis implied in knowledge.

These principles of association determine the imagination to combine ideas in various modes, and by this mechanical combination Hume, for a time, endeavoured to explain what are otherwise called judgments of relation.

The only combination which, even in appearance, could be explained satisfactorily by its means was the formation of a complex idea out of simpler parts, but the idea of a relation among facts is not accurately described as a complex idea; and, as such relations have na basis in impressions, Hume is finally driven to a confession of the absolute impossibility of explaining them.

The psychological conception, then, on the basis of which Hume proceeds to discuss the theory of knowledge, is that of conscious experience as containing merely the succession of isolated impressions and their fainter copies, ideas, and as bound on.

Hume wavers somewhat in his division of the various kinds of cognition, laying stress now upon one now upon another of the points in which mainly they differ from one another.

Hume's well-known distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact corresponds fairly to this separation of the formal and real problems in the theory of cognition, although that distinction is in itself inadequate and not fully representative of Hume's own conclusions.

With regard, then, to the first problem, the formal element in knowledge, Hume has to consider several questions, distinct in nature and hardly discriminated by him with sufficient precision.

Not all of these points are discussed by Hume with the same fulness, and with regard to some of them it is difficult to state his conclusions.

Beyond all question Hume, in endeavouring to answer this problem, is brought face to face with one of the difficulties inherent in his conception of conscious experience.

Certain impressions, the sensations of sight and touch, have in themselves the element of space, for these impressions (Hume skilfully transfers his statement to the points) have a certain order or mode of arrangement.

It is almost superfluous to remark, first, that Hume here deliberately gives up his fundamental principle that ideas are but the fainter copies of impressions, for it can never be maintained that order of disposition is an impression, and, secondly, that he fails to offer any explanation of the mode in which coexistence and succession are possible elements, of cognition in a conscious experience made up of isolated presentations and representations.

Such distinction is quite foreign to Hume, and can only be ascribed to him from an entire misconception of his view regarding the ideas of space and time.

If taken in isolation this passage might appear sufficient justification for Kant's view that, according to Hume, geometrical judgments are analytical and therefore perfect.

But it is to be recollected that, according to Hume, an idea is actually a representation or individual picture, not a notion or even a schema, and that he never claims to be able to extract the predicate of a geometrical judgment by analysis of the subject.

So far, then, as geometry is concerned, Hume's opinion is perfectly definite.

Upon the nature of the reasoning by which in mathematical science we pass from data to conclusions, Hume gives no explicit statement.

For in the latter case we possess, according to Hume, no standard of equivalence other than that supplied by immediate observation, and consequently transition from one premise to another by way of reasoning must be, in geometrical matters, a purely verbal process.

Hume's theory of mathematics - the only one, perhaps, which is compatible with his fundamental principle of psychology - is a practical condemnation of his empirical theory of perception.

A somewhat detailed consideration of Hume's doctrine with regard to mathematical science has been given for the reason that this portion of his theory has been very generally overlooked or misinterpreted.

It will probably be sufficient to indicate the problem as conceived by Hume, and the relation of the method he adopts for solving it to the fundamental doctrine of his theory of knowledge.

Real cognition, as Hume points out, implies transition from the present impression or feeling to something connected with it.

What, for a conscious experience so constituted as Hume will admit, is the precise significance of such belief in real existence ?

The natural link of connexion Hume finds in the similarities presented by experience.

While it is evident that some such conclusion must follow from the attempt to regard the cognitive consciousness as made up of disconnected feelings, it is equally clear, not only that the result is selfcontradictory, but that it involves certain assumptions not in any way deducible from the fundamental view with which Hume starts.

Deferring his criticism of the significance of self and object, Hume yet makes use of both to aid his explanation of the belief attaching to reality.

For a past impression is purely transitory, and, as Hume occasionally points out, can have no connexion of fact with the present consciousness.

The final problem of Hume's theory of knowledge, the discussion of the real significance of the two factors of cognition, self and external things, is handled in the Treatise with great fulness and dialectical subtlety.

The weak points in Hume's empiricism are so admirably realized Negative by the author himself that it is only fair to quote his own Negativ of summary in the Appendix to the Treatise.

Hume sees distinctly that if conscious experience be taken as containing only isolated states, no progress in explanation of cognition is possible, and that the only hope of further development is to be looked for in a radical change in our mode of conceiving experience.

The work of the critical philosophy is the introduction of this new mode of regarding experience, a mode which, in the technical language of philosophers, has received the title of transcendental as opposed to the psychological method followed by Locke and Hume.

It is because Kant alone perceived the full significance of the change required in order to meet the difficulties of the empirical theory that we regard his system as the only sequel to that of Hume.

The writers of the Scottish school, Reid in particular, did undoubtedly indicate some of the weaknesses in Hume's fundamental conception, and their attempts to show that the isolated feeling cannot be taken as the ultimate and primary unit of cognitive experience are efforts in the right direction.

But the question of knowledge was never generalized by them, and their reply to Hume, therefore, remains partial and inadequate, while its effect is weakened by the uncritical assumption of principles which is a characteristic feature of their writings.

The results of Hume's theoretical analysis are applied by him to the problems of practical philosophy and religion.

For the first of these the reader is referred to the article Ethics, where Theology Hume's views are placed in relation to those of his pre- and ethics.

There can be no doubt that Hume has continually in mind the theological questions then current, and that he was fully aware of the mode in which his analysis of knowledge might be applied to them.

There is, however, appended one of those perplexing statements of personal opinion (for Hume declares Cleanthes to be his mouthpiece) not uncommon among writers of this period.

It is apparent, even from the brief summary just given, that the importance of Hume in the history of philosophy consists in the vigour and logical exactness with which he develops a particular metaphysical view.

In Hume's theory of knowledge we have the final expression of what may be called psychological individualism or atomism, while his ethics and doctrine of religion are but the logical consequences of this theory.

So far as metaphysic is concerned, Hume has given the final word of the empirical school, and all additions, whether from the specifically psychological side or from the general history of human culture, are subordinate in character, and affect in no way the nature of his results.

Mill made in theory no advance beyond Hume.

In the logic of Mill, e.g., we find much of a special character that has no counterpart in Hume, much that is introduced ab extra, from general considerations of scientific procedure, but, so far as the groundwork is concerned, the System of Logic is a mere reproduction of Hume's doctrine of knowledge.

Hume's eminence in the fields of philosophy and history must not be allowed to obscure his importance as a political economist.

But Hume was the first to apply to economics the scientific methods of his philosophy.

We have said that Berkeley and Locke had already begun the general work for which Hume is most important; in details also Hume had been anticipated to some extent.

Yet when we compare Hume with Adam Smith, the advance which Hume had made on his predecessors in lucidity of exposition and subtlety of intellect becomes clear, and modern criticism is agreed that the main errors of Adam Smith are to be found in those deductions which deviate from the results of the Political Discourses.

Indeed it has been fairly observed that Hume retains an attitude of refined mercantilism.

To sum up, it may be said that Hume enunciated the principle that " everything in the world is purchased by labour, and our passions are the only causes of labour "; and further, that, in analysing the complex phenomena of commerce, he is superior sometimes to Adam Smith in that he never forgets that the ultimate causes of economic change are the " customs and manners " of the people, and that the solution of problems is to be sought in the elementary factors of industry.

MacCosh published a short pamphlet (1884) containing interesting but perhaps not conclusive arguments on the Agnosticism of Hume and Huxley.

Finally, the psychology of Hobbes, though too undeveloped to guide the thoughts or even perhaps arrest the attention of Locke, when essaying the scientific analysis of knowledge, came in course of time (chiefly through James Mill) to be connected with the theory of associationism developed from within the school of Locke, in different ways, by Hartley and Hume; nor is it surprising that the later associationists, finding their principle more distinctly formulated in the earlier thinker, should sometimes have been betrayed into affiliating themselves to Hobbes rather than to Locke.

In 1848 he voted for Hume's household suffrage motion, and introduced a bill for the repeal of the Game Laws.

From this point he fell into the scepticism of Hume.

On the other hand, Hume is certainly right in holding that the distinctive character of a percept as compared with an image is in all ordinary cases the force and liveliness with which it strikes the mind - the distinction, therefore, being one of quality, not of degree.

The Remonstrants, that is, the clerical fanatics to whom toleration was more especially abominable, are reckoned (Hume Brown) as the majority of the preachers, but exact statistics cannot be obtained.

Now " by concession " (a third indulgence) " and repression, the once mighty force of Scottish Presbyterianism had at length been broken " (Hume Brown).

To quote Dr Hume Brown again, " When the absolutism of the Stuarts was succeeded by a more rational government (1689), the example of the Indulged ministers, who composed the great mass of the Presbyterian clergy, was of the most potent effect in substituting the idea of toleration for that of the religious absolutism of Knox and Melville."

To quote Dr Hume Brown, Claverhouse " kept strictly within the limits of his commission, and he carried out his orders with the distinct aim of saving blood in the end.

Hutchinson, David Hume, Home and Robertson were assiduous in avoiding Scotticisms as far as they might; even Burns, who summed up the popular past of Scotland in his vernacular poetry, as a rule wrote English in his letters, and when he wrote English verse he often followed the artificial style of the 18th century.

There is much new information among the documents published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, by the Scottish History Society, and the Register of the Privy Council, edited by Professors Masson and Hume Brown.

There is, of course, frequent interaction between these two movements, but recognition of their separate development is necessary to the understanding of such contemporary contrasts as the Thrissil and the Rois and Peblis to the Play, Drummond and Montgomerie, Ramsay and Hume.

The interesting philological tractate Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue by Alexander Hume (not the verse writer, u.s.) is in its language a medley; and William Lithgow had travelled too widely to retain his native speech in purity, even in his indifferent verse.

He had studied Gibbon, Hume and Montesquieu in Switzerland.

By this critical scepticism Maimon takes up a position intermediate between Kant and Hume.

Hume's attitude to the empirical is entirely supported by Maimon.

Belief is, according to Hamann, the groundwork of knowledge, and he accepts in all sincerity Hume's analysis of experience as being most helpful in constructing a theological view.

Hume had constant recourse to this armoury.

The faith of science looks outward as in the dawn of Greek philosophy, and subjectivism such as Hume's has as yet no hold.

His influence on his successors has rather lain in the general stimulus of his enthusiasm for experience, or in the success with which he represents the cause of nominalism and in certain special devices of method handed down till, through Hume or Herschel, they affected the thought of Mill.

Hume derived from him the explanatory formula of the association of ideas, 8 which is, however, still with Hobbes a fact to be accounted for, not a theory to account for facts, being grounded physically in " coherence of the matter moved."

When Berkeley has eliminated the literal materialism of Locke's metaphors of sense-perception, Hume finds no difficulty in accepting the sensations as present virtually in their own right, any nonsensible ground being altogether unknown.

Berkeley, though at length the notions of spirits, acts and relations 6 give him pause, prefers the formula which Hume expresses in the phrase that " some ideas are particular in their nature but general in their representation," 7 and the afterhistory of " abstraction " is a discussion of the conditions under which one idea " stands for " a group. Not from those for whom general ideas mean schematic concepts, not imageable.

Apart from the adoption by Hume of the association of ideas as the explanatory formula of the school - it had been allowed by Malebranche within the framework of his mysticism and employed by Berkeley in his theory of vision - there are few fresh notes struck in the logic of sensationalism.

What, however, Hume describes as " all the logic I think proper to employ in my reasoning," viz.

It may, perhaps, be accounted to Hume for righteousness that he declares - whether consistently or not is another matter - that " the same effect never arises but from the same cause," and that he still follows Bacon in the conception of absentia in proximo.

It is " when in any instance we find our expectation disappointed " that the effect of one of " two resembling objects " will be like that of the other that Hume proposes to apply his method of difference.

No scientific discipline, however, with the doubtful exception of descriptive psychology, stands to gain anything from a temper like that of Hume.

It was because the aftermath of Newtonian science was so rich that the scientific faith of naturalism was able to retain a place besides its epistemological creed that a logician of the school could arise whose spirit was in some sort Baconian, but who, unlike Bacon, had entered the modern world, and faced the problems stated for it by Hume and by Newton.

In uniting with this the Associationism which he inherited, through his father, from Hume, he revealed at once the strength and weakness of the dual conception of naturalism.

He aims at describing what he 9 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, i.

It is of course a newer type of psychological logic that is in question, one that is aware of Kant's " answer to Hume."

Major Hume appears to combine the latter theory with Philip's political objection to Escovedo.

For the murder of Escovedo, see Andrew Lang's discussion of it in his Historical Mysteries (1904); and the Espanoles e ingleses (1903) of Major" Martin Hume, who had access to various newly discovered MSS.

The natural condition of society, natural law, natural religion, the poetry of nature, gained a singular hold, first on the English philosophers from Hume onwards, and then (through Rousseau chiefly) on the general drift of thought and action in Europe.

Hume, taking for granted that benevolence is the supreme virtue, points out that the essence of benevolence is to increase the happiness of others.

Hume raises the question explicitly, but answers that here is an ultimate principle beyond which we cannot hope to penetrate.

For this reason Hume is sometimes classed as a moral-sense philosopher rather than as a utilitarian.

Sir John Bowring tells us that when Bentham was casting about for such a criterion " he met with Hume's Essays and found in them what he sought.

These acts helped greatly to discredit the Moderate party, of whose spirit they were the outcome; and that party further injured their standing in the country by attacking Leslie, afterwards Sir John Leslie, on frivolous grounds - a phrase he had used about Hume's view of causation - when he applied for the chair of mathematics in Edinburgh.

The materials at Hume's command, however, were destined to vast and speedy expansion.

That the direct objects of knowledge, the realities of experience, were after all only our ideas or from perceptions was the lesson of every thinker from Descartes to Hume.

In substantials the theory of Schopenhauer may be compared with a more prosaic statement of Herbert Spencer (modernizing Hume).

Hume's casual allusion to "this famous atheist" and his "hideous hypothesis" is a fair specimen of the tone in which he is usually referred to; people talked about Spinoza, Lessing said, "as if he were a dead dog."

Mr Burton's view (differing from that of Professor Hume Brown) was that the dialogues - the earlier of them at least - must have been spoken in the French tongue, in which Knox had recently preached for a year.

But among the many express biographies two especially should be consulted - those by Thomas McCrie (Edinburgh, 1811; revised and enlarged in 1813, the later editions containing valuable notes by the author); and by P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1895).

In other directions he laid under tribute Herder and Lessing; yet all the while he cast severe imputations of plagiarism upon Hume and others.

In this emphatic declaration, that knowledge of the course of nature is merely probable, Butler is at one with Hume, who was a most diligent student of the bishop's works.

What can come nearer Hume's celebrated maxim - "Anything may be the cause of anything else," than Butler's conclusion, "so that any one thing whatever may, for aught we know to the contrary, be a necessary condition to any other."

He is willing with Hume to take the course of experience as the basis of his reasoning, seeing that it is common ground for himself and his antagonists.

In one essential respect, however, he goes beyond Hume.

Hume readily grants this much, though he hints at a formidable difficulty which the plan of the Analogy prevented Butler from facing, the proof of the existence of God.

For men like Hume and Gibbon the standpoint of deism was long left behind; yet Gibbon's famous two chapters might well have been written by a deist.

Roscher names him as having, along with Locke and Dudley North, raised the English school to the highest point it attained before the time of Hume.

But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected.

As a general argument his account of the determination of the will is defective, notably in his abstract conception of the will and in his inadequate, but suggestive, treatment of causation, in regard to which he anticipates in important respects the doctrine of Hume.

Certainly the most able metaphysician and the most influential religious thinker of America, he must rank in theology, dialectics, mysticism and philosophy with Calvin and Fenelon, Augustine and Aquinas, Spinoza and Novalis; with Berkeley and Hume as the great English philosophers of the 18th century; and with Hamilton and Franklin as the three American thinkers of the same century of more than provincial importance.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in the English school since Hume, psychology superseded properly philosophical inquiry.

The same confusion runs through Berkeley's arguments and vitiates his conclusions as well as those of Hume.

Jacobi's next important work, David Hume fiber den Glauben, oder Idealismus and Realismus (1787), was an attempt to show not only that the term Glaube had been used by the most eminent writers to denote what he had employed it for in the Letters on Spinoza, but that the nature of the cognition of facts as opposed to the construction of inferences could not be otherwise expressed.

It was also interesting to reflect that Gladstone had begun life as a Conservative, and had only gradually moved to the ranks of the Liberal party; while Disraeli had fought his first election under the auspices of OConnell and Hume, had won his spurs by his attacks on Sir Robert Peel, and had been only reluctantly adopted by the Conservatives as their leader in the House of Commons.

Macaulay is not greatly superior in impartiality to Hume; Gibbon and Robertson were less open to temptation because they avoided English subjects.

The common story that he was a candidate for Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, when Hume was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be wholly false.

In the first he was recommended to the electors by Daniel O'Connell and the Radical Hume.

Hume had not yet shown the sceptical objections against conclusions which Locke accepted without criticism.

Investigation of the foundation of inductive inference was resumed by Hume where Locke left it.

With a still humbler view of human reason than Locke's, Hume proposed as " a subject Locke and worthy of curiosity," to inquire into " the nature of t h at Hume.

Hume argues that custom is a sufficient practical explanation of this gradual enlargement of our objective experience, and that no deeper explanation is open to man.

Hume negatively, and the German and Scottish schools constructively, continued what it was Locke's glory to have begun.

Hume's doctrine follows logically from his theory as to the nature of causality.

His suggestions were developed by Hutcheson into one of the most elaborate systems of moral philosophy which we possess; through Hutcheson, if not directly, they influenced Hume's speculations, and are thus connected with later utilitarianism.

An important step further in political utilitarianism was taken by Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739).

Hume concedes that a compact is the natural means of peace fully instituting a new government, and may therefore be properly regarded as the ground of allegiance to it at the outset; but he urges that, when once it is firmly established the duty of obeying it rests on precisely the same combination of private and general interests as the duty of keeping promises; it is therefore absurd to base the former on the latter.

It is this last position that constitutes the fundamental difference between Hutcheson's ethical doctrine and Hume's.'

This naturally suggested to a mind like Hume's, anxious to apply the experimental method to psychology, the problem of reducing these different elements of personal merit - or rather our approval of them - to some common principle.

If we ask what actual motive we have for virtuous conduct, Hume's answer is not quite clear.

It is difficult to make these views quite consistent; but at any rate Hume emphatically maintains that " reason is no motive to action," except so far as it " directs the impulse received from appetite or inclination "; 2 Hume's ethical view was finally stated in his Inquiry into the Principles of Morals (1751), which is at once more popular and more purely utilitarian than his earlier work.

But even if we consider the moral consciousness merely as a particular kind of pleasurable emotion, there is an obvious question suggested by Hume's theory, to which he gives no adequate answer.

On this point Hume contents himself with the vague remark that " there are a numerous set of passions and sentiments, of which thinking rational beings are by the original constitution of nature the only proper objects."

The truth is, that Hume's notion of moral approbation was very loose, as is sufficiently shown by the list of " useful and agreeable " qualities which he considers worthy of approbation.'

Adam Smith gives authority to his moral system by saying ' In earlier editions of the Inquiry Hume expressly included all approved qualities under the general notion of " virtue."

So Hume insists emphatically on the " reality of moral obligation "; but is found to mean no more by this than the real existence of the likes and dislikes that human beings feel for each other's qualities.

The binding force of moral rules becomes evanescent if we admit, with Hutcheson, that the " sense " of them may properly vary from man to man as the palate does; and it seems only another way of putting Hume's doctrine, that reason is not concerned with the ends of action, to say that the mere existence of a moral sentiment is in itself no reason for obeying it.

It might either fall back on the moral principles commonly accepted, and, affirming their objective validity, endeavour to exhibit them as a coherent and complete set of ultimate ethical truths; or it might take the utility or conduciveness to pleasure, to which Hume had referred for the origin of most sentiments, as an ultimate end and standard by which these sentiments might be judged and corrected.

The rationality of the former principle he takes pains to explain and establish; in opposition to Hume's doctrine that it is no part of the function of reason to determine the ends which we ought to pursue, or the preference due to one end over another.

The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume's way or in Adani Smith's; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses.

But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free-will either to duty generally or to justice in particular.

But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness.

There he became acquainted with the works of Jakob Boehme, and with the ideas of Hume, Hartley and Godwin, which were extremely distasteful to him.

Thus Hume is a positivist in the sense that he specifically restricts philosophy to the sphere of observation, and regards the causal relation as being nothing more than what we have been accustomed to expect.

Lewes censures Renan for asserting of Ghazali's theory of causation - " Hume n'a rien dit plus."

But while Hume absolutely denies the necessity, Ghazali merely removes it one stage farther back, and plants it in the mind of the Deity.

His criticisms are worth more than his constructions; indeed for exactness and penetration of thought he is quite on a level with Hume and Kant.

This doctrine is derived from Berkeley and Hume on the one hand and from Kantianism on the other, and embodies the principle that nothing can exist for the mind save itself.

He was well versed in English literature, chiefly of the age of Queen Anne, and had read English philosophy from Locke to Hume, and the Scottish school.

Of these difficulties the philosophies of Berkeley and Hume are systematic treatments.

It is only in Hume that we have definitely and completely the evolution of the individualist notion as groundwork of a theory of knowledge; and it is in his writings, therefore, that we may expect to find the fundamental difficulty of that notion clearly apparent.

It is not a little remarkable that we should find in Hume, not only the sceptical dissolution of all fixity of cognition, which is the inevitable result of the individualist method, but also the clearest consciousness of the very root of the difficulty.