day to day for immediate, limited objectives, guided by conscience and accumulated experience.
Whereas Hobbes and Locke, empiricists though they were, were still seeking a single, unifying vision of life, Hobbes in terms of will, Locke in terms of reason, Hume emphasized imagination, a receptive, passive power, not a creative, moulding power. What gives form to life, as Hume saw it, is not any ideal mould into which all men must fit, nor some distant overpowering end to be pursued throughout life, but felt principles that guide the manner of choosing without prescribing in advance what is to be chosen.
As an analysis of moral behaviour, Hume’s account left something to be desired. He admitted the influence of reason in a number of ways but left its nature undefined. He described the calm passions as founded on a distant view or reflection. In his discussion of artificial virtues, the practical reason seems to determine the sense of moral obligation, and at times Hume even implied that unreasonable conduct may result not only from false judgements but from a failure to make certain judgements. He not only made it clear that judgements bring to our attention certain facts which affect our desires, but he distinguished sharply between mere liking and moral approval, which depended on being able to see a thing or action independently of its relation to one’s own interests. Yet precisely how felt principles were related to judgements, or how from a judgement that a means is desirable we are moved to desire that means, whether practical judgements can prompt passions, or whether reason operating under the control of one passion had any power to control other passions, Hume did not say. He was after all less anxious to elaborate a complete psychology of moral behaviour than to liberate morality from the dominance of pure reason, and show up the deficiencies of both the puritanical antipathy to nature and the rationalist illusion that a code of moral conduct could be deduced from a few absolutely certain principles. In order to deny that moral action could be reduced to a set of impersonal universal rules, he tried to exclude reason as a source of moral conviction and to put feeling in its place, thus making it impossible for the moral reaction to be anything but concrete and personal.
Perhaps the best summary of the moral temper Hume was defending is to be found in his views on personal identity. The person, he said, is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”1 He described the mind not as an essence or permanent core, but as a “kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.”1 We like to think that there is a connecting principle, and we invent fictions like a soul or self or substance. But in fact there is nothing, Hume declared, beyond a succession of related sensations, an easy transition of ideas that produces the notion of personal identity, for we can have no notion of any existence or of any simple substance apart from particular perceptions.2 Man cannot then escape doing what Spinoza described as “willy-nilly things which he knows absolutely nothing about.” He cannot survey the whole of his life and decide which things he ought to desire most. Whereas Spinoza regarded men who remained at the mercy of circumstances as not properly free beings, both Hume’s moral theory and his description of the self were designed to impress on men that they were necessarily at the mercy of circumstances and could never take account of all possible actions and their consequences. They could not hope to be perfectly self-conscious.
Hume recognized that his view of the self led him into inconsistency—he could not explain what it was that did the perceiving of distinct existences, nor could he see any other source of connection among them. But having raised the question, he was content to leave it unresolved. He had not constructed a perfect philosophical system, but he had succeeded in describing how the human person looked to a man of his moral temperament. Like everything else in the universe, it was not formed by an effort to make a unity or impose a pattern. It had no sharp outlines. It was an amorphous whole that came together out of assorted sensations, actions and ideas. It was a theatre, and a bundle.
The Philosophical Enthusiasm Renounced
In the end, Hume’s feeling for the complexity and uncertainty of everything human destroyed his faith in his own philosophy. All his painstaking inquiries led him to conclude that there were no grounds for being sure of anything, either in philosophy or common life. He had after all shown that the belief in truth was nothing more than experience and habit working on imagination to give some ideas more force than others. His philosophy seemed to require him to regard no opinion as more probable or likely than any others, and made it meaningless even to desire to known ultimate truth:1 “’Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we attempt to justify them in that manner.”2
This was in a way what Hume had set out to do. He had intended his philosophy to persuade men that there was no infallible truth about human behaviour and the world. Although men had to act in ordinary life as if they were certain, Hume wished them always to keep a reservation in their minds and hearts. In a sense, he was asking only for what truly reasonable men have always done, although there have never been many such men. For most people have to choose between doubting and believing, and can rarely understand the possibility of doing both at once. In fact, however, Hume had gone beyond characterizing the reasonable man. He had translated a state of mind, a disposition, into a philosophy.
As a result, he began to fancy himself “in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.” If once he left his study, to converse, dine, or play backgammon with his friends, when he returned, his speculations struck him as “so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther.”1 The solitude which the pursuit of philosophy imposed upon him was nearly unbearable. He began to fancy himself some “strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate.”2 In short, philosophy, with all its “subtleties and sophistries,”3 seemed hardly a reasonable occupation.
Yet he could not give it up. While composing the Treatise, he was still wholly infatuated:
I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations which actuate and govern me. I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful and another deformed; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed.4
It was something after all, he decided, to have given a new turn to philosophical speculation and to have emphasized the importance of experience, of observing human nature, as against theorizing about it in the abstract. And he became reconciled to being more certain than his speculations warranted; he told himself that it was proper to “yield to that propensity which inclines us to be positive and certain in particular points, according to the light in which we survey them in any particular instant.”5 But before very long, he came to think differently.
During the years after he returned with his Treatise from France, while he was marking time in London, in the worldly society of the coffee houses, at the Rainbow, or with other Scotsmen at the British in Cockspur Street, his doubts about philosophy grew upon him. The indifference with which his book had been greeted confirmed this mood. He began to suspect “in a cool hour” that most of his reasonings would be “more useful by furnishing Hints and exciting People’s Curiosity than as containing any Principles that will augment the Stock of Knowledge that must pass to future Ages.”6
In the essays that he wrote during those