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The Permanent Significance of Hume's Philosophy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

H. H. Price
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Extract

The subject of my lecture is an appropriate one for several reasons. The first is purely chronological. Hume's first and greatest work, the Treatise of Human Nature, was published in 1739, two hundred years ago. Its illustrious author was then quite unknown in the world, and as he tells us himself the book “fell dead-born from the press.” But by the end of the eighteenth century its reputation was securely established, and it has long been regarded as one of the masterpieces of European thought, and as the classical statement of the Empiricist Philosophy. It is true that, like other classics, it has had its ups and downs. During the Absolute Idealist period, which ended early in the present century, Hume was the great bogey-man, and the duty of all self-respecting philosophers was to refute him. In our own day things are different. Empiricism, despite many obituary notices, is very much alive again. And this time it is in close alliance with Natural Science, and has equipped itself with all the technique of modern Symbolic Logic; it is more vigorous in construction and more formidable in criticism than it has ever been before. Consequently Hume is no longer the bogey-man. People now read the Treatise not as an awful warning, but as a source of stimulus and illumination. Incidentally, we can now enjoy his admirable style without any qualms. It is no longer thought that if a philosopher writes in clear and entertaining English, what he writes must therefore be either superficial or false. We regard obscurity and turgidity as demerits, not as signs of profound thinking. Moreover, we have learned to appreciate the eighteenth century, of which Hume was one of the most characteristic products.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 57 , January 1940 , pp. 7 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1940

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References

page 8 note 1 Hume himself was a Tory in politics, chiefly because he disliked the humbug of the Whig historians. But I think he was a Liberal in my large sense, like most of the great eighteenth—century thinkers.

page 12 note 1 Hume, and most modern Empiricists with him, assumes that there are no other sorts of acquaintance besides these two. It is difficult to see what reasons they can have. Mystical experience, for example, might be—or include—a kind of acquaintance which is neither sensory nor introspective.

page 13 note 1 In the Inquiry Hume adds (Euclidean) geometry to the list, though in the Treatise he says that it is empirical.

page 15 note 1 Treatise, Book I, part iv, section 6 (Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 262. Everyman edition, pp. 247–8).

page 16 note 1 Treatise, Book I, part iv, section 2.

page 17 note 1 Treatise, Book I, part iii, section 14. “Of the idea of necessary connection.” Cf. also the parallel discussion in section 7 of the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

page 18 note 1 In the Appendix to theTreatise (Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 632) and more fully in section 7 of the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

page 24 note 1 J. M. Keynes, Treatise on Probability, part iii. Broad, C. D., Mind, 1918 and 1920.Google Scholar

page 24 note 2 Treatise, Book I, part iii, section 15.

page 25 note 1 In the section called Why a cause is always necessary (Treatise, Book I, part iii, section 3). Hume examines three alleged demonstrations—those of Hobbes, of Locke, and of Clarke—and shows that all three are circular.

page 25 note 2 The need for this axiom seems to have been first discovered by Mr. Keynes and Professor Broad. I have stated it in my own way, and in a simplified and inaccurate form. Mr. Keynes's name for it is “The Principle of Limited Independent Variety.”

page 30 note 1 Cf. Mr. Russell on “Mnemic Causation” in The Analysis of Mind.

page 31 note 1 Treatise, Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 183; Everyman edition, p. 179.

page 31 note 2 Ibid., the same page, a little above.

page 32 note 1 Treatise, first paragraph of Part IV, section 4, “Of the Modern Philosophy” (Selby-Bigge, p. 225; Everyman, pp. 215–16).

page 32 note 2 S.B., pp. 225–226, E., p. 216. I have italicized the word “justly.”

page 33 note 1 In this strange method of prediction, in case any of my readers axe unfamiliar with it, one opens the works of Vergil at random and reads the first line on which one's eye falls. There are also Sortes Biblicae and, I believe, Sortes Koranicae. If civilization breaks down, our successors will no doubt use the Critique of Pure Reason in the same way.

page 35 note 1 This sense of the word “reasonable,” as Cardinal Newman hints in his Grammar of Assent, corresponds fairly closely to Aristotle's usage of the word φρονησις (commonly translated “practical wisdom"). Unfortunately Newman, like Hume, is obsessed by the purely deductive sense of the word “reasonable,” and therefore has to credit the man who makes sensible predictions with a mysterious faculty invented ad hoc, which he calls the Illative Sense.

page 36 note 1 This distinction between “solving” a problem and “dissolving” it is due, unless I am mistaken, to Dr. Wittgenstein.