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Classics

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Hilarius Bogbinder reviews David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.

“Next to ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of making much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident than beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as man” (Treatise, p.176). When David Hume (1711-76) wrote these words, a mere hundred years had passed since René Descartes described animals as mere machines. Yet in this and in many other ways, the twenty-something college dropout who published this magnum opus was exceptionally modern.

A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, to give the book its full title, was published in instalments in 1739-40. A handful of other philosophers have written books that contained all their thoughts: Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818) come to mind. But few others were so revolutionary in their impact and spawned so many new ideas and problems as Hume’s Treatise. Written while the author was working in France, this masterpiece foreshadowed ideas that have since defined both continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and which completely redefined both practical and theoretical thinking in the West. Without the Treatise, it is safe to say, Immanuel Kant would never have written the Critique of Pure Reason, and Karl Popper and G.E. Moore would not have made their contributions, to epistemology and ethics respectively. As Kant himself wrote, “I openly confess my recollection of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations… a new direction” (Prolegoma to any Future Metaphysics, p.5). He went on, “Since Locke and Leibniz… nothing has ever happened which could have been more decisive to the fate of metaphysics than the attack made upon it by David Hume” (Ibid).

Hume had tried to study law, and had briefly been apprenticed to a businessman in Bristol, but with no success. As he later wrote, he “found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy” (My Own Life, p.522, 1777). So he travelled to France, worked in a vineyard in La Flèche on the Loire, played backgammon, and wrote a philosophical masterpiece.

The Treatise was a philosophical cri de cœur, written at a time when the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, fact, and the right to think freely were coming to Scotland. The young whippersnapper who wrote the book confidently quoted the Roman historian Tacitus (56-120 AD) on the first page: Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet – “It is the rare happiness of times when you may think what you wish and say what you want”. But the people of Scotland – and indeed elsewhere – were not impressed. In the year the book was published, Hume wrote to Michael Ramsey – another expat Scot – “I am afraid I shall not have any great success” (22 February, 1739). And truly, although the book was to revolutionize philosophy, it did not take off. A second edition was not published in Hume’s lifetime. Later, when he had found success as a historian, he reflected on his early failure: “Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among zealots” (My Own Life, p.524).

Hume, while naturally disappointed, was stoic and still confident. It was, he wrote, understandable that this book did not meet with success, for the ‘principles’ within it were “so remote from all the vulgar sentiments… that they would produce almost a total alteration of philosophy” (Letter to Henry Home, 13th February, 1739). Perhaps overconfident, and with a whiff of the arrogance of youth. And yet words that, in hindsight were not merely true but almost an understatement. Few philosophy books have had the same impact as the Treatise.

Hume later had a go at writing a more accessible version, which he entitled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748); but by then he had begun to focus on British history. To his contemporaries he was known as David Hume the historian, not the philosopher. But it is in the Treatise we find for instance the problem of induction: the idea that you cannot draw universal conclusions from a finite number of cases – we can never say that all swans are white just because we have never seen a black one. This problem is important for the philosophy of science, and it was first discussed by Hume, who wrote, “that there can be no demonstrative arguments to prove that those instances, of which we have had no experiences, resemble those of which we have had experience” (p.89). One of the problems of modern statistics is how to calculate the importance of different factors. This too was a problem Hume foresaw: “no questions in philosophy are more difficult than when a number of causes present themselves for the same phenomenon, to determine which is the principle and predominant [one]” (p.504). But Hume also touched upon more fundamental issues, such as causation: he was the first modern philosopher to question our presumptions regarding cause and effect, by stressing that “the idea of cause and effect is derived from experience, which informs us that such particular objects in all past instances have been constantly conjoine’d with each other” (p.90). The fact that the ball on the snooker table has always been seen to start rolling when it’s hit by another is no proof that this will always happen: it’s possible that next time, flowers sprout up!

Statue of Hume in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. It is said to be lucky to touch his toe.
David Hume Unshod © Neil Owen 2011 Creative Commons 2

As the subtitle Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects indicates, the Treatise ultimately aimed at making a contribution to moral philosophy. That it awoke Kant from his snooze has meant that this fact is often overlooked, and that the book is more often seen as a contribution to epistemology (or the theory of knowledge) or metaphysics.

In moral philosophy few problems are more fundamental than the gulf between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. The tendency to jump from a statement of facts to one that prescribes a particular action, is often known to philosophers as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ – Where do you get the ‘ought’ from? This problem too was first introduced by Hume in the Treatise, in a passage that deserves to be quoted:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author… makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it's necessary that it should be observed and explained” (p.469).

Hume was an iconoclast. In a way he undermined the foundations of both epistemology and ethics. But it was this radical questioning that prompted others to ask fundamental questions, too.

Hume, it should be said, also made positive contributions to philosophy. When Adam Smith and later John Rawls, developed theories of the impartial “spectator [who] must sympathize” with those in misery” (p.369), their ideas ultimately went back to Hume. The Treatise also contributed in other ways to political theory. In modern times, political scientists talk about ‘Rational Choice Theory’, which too was foreshadowed by Hume: “Nothing”, he wrote, “is more certain than that men are in a great measure governe’d by interest, and that even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, ‘tis not any great distance” (p.534). In response to this selfishness, Hume sought to overcome the problem of co-ordinating collective action by establishing a state, which “forces [people] to seek their own advantage by a concurrence in some common end or purpose” (p.538). Later in life, Hume was known as ‘the sceptical Tory’, and he wrote, in language that foreshadowed the conservative writer and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797) that, “it is not with forms of governments, as with other artificial contrivances; where an old engine can be rejected, if we can discover another more accurate and commodious… An established government has an infinite advantage, by the very circumstance of its being established” (Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, p.298). But this idea was also originally present in the Treatise, if in rudimentary form.

Hume speaks through the ages. At a time when there is an assault on facts, when people are prone to resort to prejudices, he reminds us that “nothing is more dangerous to reason than flights of imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers” (p.267). The Treatise may not have initially lived up to Hume’s expectations. But later generations appreciated its importance, not merely because of the ideas contained in it, but also because of Hume’s eloquent turn of phrase – perhaps none more so than his almost postmodern sounding dictum, “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” (p.415).

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born writer and translator. He studied politics and theology at Oxford University and lives in London.