A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
A Treatise of Human Nature
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The first three paragraphs of the Introduction, in which Hume describes the quarrels of the learned, the rule of eloquence over reason, and the common prejudice against metaphysical reasoning
Nothing is more usual and more natural for those, who pretend to discover anything new to the world in philosophy and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their own systems, by decrying all those, which have been advanced before them. And indeed were they content with lamenting that ignorance, which we still lie under in the most important questions, that can come before the tribunal of human reason, there are few, who have an acquaintance with the sciences, that would not readily agree with them. It is easy for one of judgment and learning, to perceive the weak foundation even of those systems, which have obtained the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are everywhere to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself.
Nor is there required such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences, but even the rabble without doors may, judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all goes not well within. There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions. The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision. Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain. Amidst all this bustle it is not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army.
From hence in my opinion arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those, who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature. By metaphysical reasonings, they do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended. We have so often lost our labour in such researches, that we commonly reject them without hesitation, and resolve, if we must forever be a prey to errors and delusions, that they shall at least be natural and entertaining. And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious.
The excerpt stops at the end of the third paragraph, where Hume has said that the prejudice against metaphysical arguments arises from repeated failure, that only a determined scepticism joined to indolence can justify it, and that he would count it a strong presumption against his own philosophy if it were easy.
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The book has no scene in the ordinary sense. Its subject is the mind as it perceives, feels and judges, and its examples are a chamber and a fire, a table and a chimney, a door turning on its hinges, a porter at the door, and a game of backgammon after dinner. The volumes were published in London, in 1739 and 1740.
Three books in eleven parts
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Project Gutenberg #4705 · Standard Ebooks
A Treatise of Human Nature is David Hume’s attempt to do for the mind what natural philosophy had done for bodies: to ground the study of human nature in experience and observation rather than in systems taken on trust. Book I asks how we come by our ideas and answers that every simple idea is a faint copy of an impression, the livelier perception of sense or feeling from which it is drawn; cause and effect, it argues, are never observed but only inferred by custom. Book II accounts for the passions. Book III holds that moral distinctions are felt rather than demonstrated, and that justice is an artifice of convention.
The three books are printed whole, with the Advertisement that announces the plan, the Introduction that sets it out, the Appendix in which Hume confesses the contradictions he could not resolve, and the endnotes. The argument is continuous: the theory of ideas supplies the account of causation, the account of causation supplies the theory of the passions, and the passions supply the moral sense. The Wikipedia article on the Treatise follows the reception of the book and its later fortunes. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #4705 and Standard Ebooks.
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page offers a summary and analysis of A Treatise of Human Nature, with the argument of the three books set out part by part, the terms Hume coins or turns to his own use, impressions, ideas, custom, sympathy and convention, explained where they first appear, and the steps of the reasoning kept in the order he gave them. The eleven groups are the edition’s own books and parts, so a summary can be checked against any copy that keeps Hume’s divisions. David Hume published the work in three volumes: the first two, on the understanding and the passions, in 1739, and the third, on morals, in 1740. The title page calls it an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, and the Advertisement says that the subjects of the understanding and passions make a complete chain of reasoning by themselves, and that morals, politics and criticism will follow if the public approves.
Book I, Of the Understanding, begins with the distinction on which everything else rests. Perceptions divide into impressions, which enter with force and liveliness, and ideas, which are their faint images in thinking and reasoning; every simple idea is copied from a simple impression, which is why a person born blind has no idea of colour, and why nobody can imagine the taste of a pineapple without having tasted one. Hume notes the exception he cannot explain, the missing shade of blue that a man might supply from his imagination, and lets it stand without altering his rule. Ideas are then shown to be joined by resemblance, contiguity and causation, general terms to be particular ideas used as signs, and substance to be nothing but a collection of particular qualities. The examples are homely: the New Jerusalem with gold pavement and ruby walls, and Paris, which he has seen but cannot reproduce in every street.
The second Part turns the same test on space and time. The capacity of the mind is not infinite, so the ideas of extension and duration cannot be infinitely divisible; space is the order of visible or tangible points, time the order of successive moments, and there is no idea of a vacuum apart from body. The third Part is the centre of the book. Causal reasoning is not demonstration, since no survey of two objects shows that one must follow the other, and the inference from a present impression to an absent cause is made by custom, a propensity acquired through repeated experience. Belief is not a new idea but a livelier conception; necessity is not a quality in things but the determination of the mind that constant conjunction produces; and animals, Hume adds, reason by the same principle. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from Project Gutenberg #4705.
The fourth Part draws consequences that are severe. Reason cannot defend itself, since any argument for its authority needs the authority it is trying to prove; the belief in a continued and distinct existence is traced to the constancy and coherence of impressions and to a fiction of the imagination; the self turns out to be a bundle of perceptions with no impression of its own; and the book ends with Hume in melancholy, cured by dinner, company and a game of backgammon. Book II, Of the Passions, applies the machinery to feeling. Pride and humility need two relations at once, an idea of something connected with the self and an impression of pleasure or pain, and love and hatred work the same way with another person in place of the self. Sympathy, the propensity to receive the sentiments of others by communication, explains why reputation weighs on us and why we esteem the rich and powerful.
The last Part of Book II treats the will, reconciles liberty with necessity, names Hobbes’s Leviathan in the argument that human actions show a general course of nature, and concludes that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. Book III, Of Morals, turns from fact to value. Moral distinctions are not discovered by reason, since no comparison of ideas yields an ought; they are felt by a moral sense, and the feeling is a peculiar pleasure or uneasiness raised by the survey of a character. Justice is the hard case, and Hume treats it as an artificial virtue, produced by a convention that stabilises possession and only afterwards approved, with government, allegiance, the law of nations and chastity given the same treatment. The natural virtues are traced to four sources, usefulness and agreeableness to oneself and to others. Hume later reworked Book I as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Leviathan is free here too, with the rest of the Philosophy Classics shelf.
Historical Context
The Introduction sets the book against the philosophy of the schools. Hume complains that the learned disagree about everything, that eloquence carries the prize where reason should, and that the result is a general prejudice against metaphysical reasoning of any kind. His remedy is to march on the capital instead of skirmishing on the frontier: since all the sciences depend on human nature, a science of man must come first, and it must be founded on experience and observation. He dates the application of experimental philosophy to moral subjects about a century after its application to nature, and measures the interval from my Lord Bacon to the late philosophers in England who had begun to put the science of man on a new footing, just as the same interval separates Thales from Socrates.
The volumes appeared in London, the first two in 1739 and the third in 1740, and the Advertisement is candid about the design. The understanding and the passions make a chain of reasoning by themselves, and morals, politics and criticism are promised if the public approves. He says he took advantage of this natural division in order to try the taste of the public, and John Noon printed the first two volumes while Thomas Longman printed the third. The rest did not follow in that form. Hume came to dislike the book, and he rewrote its first book as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, shorter, drier and far more widely read, so that the Treatise was left as the version in which the argument is worked out at full length, with its doubts left showing.
The book belongs to the argument about liberty and necessity that Hobbes had reopened, and it keeps Hobbes in view: Leviathan is named when Hume says that human actions show a general course of nature as truly as the weather does. Its fourth Part carries on a quarrel with the ancient and the modern systems at once, and in the long section on the immateriality of the soul Hume says that the doctrine of a simple and indivisible thinking substance is a true atheism, and would justify every sentiment for which Spinoza is infamous. The conclusion sounds a note that runs through the rest of his work, that the errors of religion are dangerous while those of philosophy are only ridiculous. The tone is calm, but the position is not: the scepticism is offered as the outcome of the argument, not as a pose adopted for effect.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Impressions and ideas: The founding distinction of the whole system. Impressions enter with force and liveliness, and cover sensations, passions and emotions as they first appear; ideas are the faint images of them in thinking and reasoning. Every simple idea is derived from a simple impression, and the book tests each of its later claims against that rule.
- Custom: Hume’s name for the propensity the mind acquires after it has seen two objects constantly conjoined: on the appearance of one it passes to the idea of the other. Custom, not reason, carries us from cause to effect, and it also supplies the vivacity that makes a belief different from a daydream.
- The bundle: His answer to the question what the self is. Looking inward, he meets only particular perceptions, heat or cold, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, and never a simple unchanging self; the mind is therefore a bundle or collection of perceptions in perpetual flux, and the identity we ascribe to it is a fiction.
- Sympathy: The propensity to receive the sentiments of others by communication, so that a cheerful face infuses complacency and an angry one casts down. It explains the love of fame and the esteem paid to the rich, and in Book III it supplies the general point of view from which moral judgments are made.
- Convention: The artifice from which justice and property arise. It is not a promise but a general sense of common interest, mutually expressed, like two men who pull the oars of a boat together, or the gradual establishment of language, or of gold and silver as measures of exchange.
- The moral sense: The faculty by which virtue and vice are felt. Morality, Hume says, is more properly felt than judged of; the sentiment of approbation is a peculiar pleasure raised by the survey of a character, and it is corrected to a common standard by sympathy and reflection.
Core Arguments & Influence
- A science of man: The Introduction makes a large claim and then sets a limit to it. Since mathematics, natural philosophy and natural religion all lie under the cognizance of human powers, the science of man is the foundation of the rest, and it must be built the way natural philosophy was built, on experience and observation. Hume admits that moral experiments cannot be made to order, since reflection disturbs the thing reflected on, so they must be gathered from the common course of the world, from men’s behaviour in company, in affairs and in their pleasures. The limit is that no hypothesis may pretend to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature: we cannot go beyond experience, and the free confession of that is part of the philosophy.
- Causation as custom: The argument of Book I, Part III is the most famous thing in the book. Reason can see that one object follows another, but not that it must; there is no impression of power or efficacy to be found in the cause, and so no idea of it either. What we have is constant conjunction, and what that produces is a determination of the mind to pass from the impression of one object to the idea of its usual attendant. Hume gives two definitions of cause in consequence, one in terms of priority and conjunction, one in terms of the mind’s transition, and draws the corollary that there is only one kind of necessity, moral and physical necessity being the same thing under different names.
- Scepticism and nature: The fourth Part of Book I turns the method against itself. Reason, examined by its own rules, destroys its own authority, and the belief in body is shown to rest on a fiction of the imagination rather than on sense or argument. Hume does not leave the reader there. The conclusion is the most personal writing in the book: he is lost in melancholy and doubts everything, and then he dines, plays backgammon and converses, and the speculations look cold and strained when he returns to them. Nature, not argument, ends the crisis, and the scepticism that survives is moderate, a diffidence in abstruse reasoning joined to a willingness to follow the common course of life.
- The passions and the will: Book II is a mechanics of feeling. Pride and humility, love and hatred, are indirect passions: they need a double relation, an idea of something related to the self or to another person, and an independent impression of pleasure or pain. Sympathy is the principle that lets one person’s sentiment become another’s, and it does as much work in morals as in the account of reputation. Book II, Part III then treats the will as an impression rather than a faculty, defends a liberty that is compatible with necessity, and argues that reason alone never moves us to act, since it can only point out the means to an end that passion has already set.
- Morality and artifice: Book III separates the virtues into two kinds. The natural ones, benevolence, greatness of mind, good sense, even cleanliness, please by the survey of the character itself, and Hume groups the pleasure under four heads: useful or agreeable to others, useful or agreeable to the person himself. Justice, allegiance, chastity and good manners are artificial: they arise from a convention that men adopt because it serves their interest, and the approval of them comes afterwards. The distinction is not a debasement. Justice is artificial, Hume says, but the sense of its morality is natural, and because the interest behind it is universal and permanent, its rules are as steady as anything in human life. The is and ought paragraph of Book III, Part I has had a longer life than any other page of the book.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of A Treatise of Human Nature?
The download is the whole Treatise: the Latin epigraph, the Advertisement, the Introduction, the half title with its subtitle, the three books with every part and every numbered section, the Appendix in which Hume sets out the difficulties he could not solve, and the endnotes. Nothing is cut, and no section is replaced by a summary. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, and it keeps the numbering of books, parts and sections that Hume printed.
The summaries follow the edition’s own divisions, eleven groups for three books, and each of them states the step the argument takes rather than cataloguing sections. A reader can use them beside the text, or as a map of a long and difficult book, and each one stops where its part stops, so nothing later in the argument is given away. The headings are Hume’s own, and so is the numbering of the sections.
The files open in the reading app already on your phone or e-reader. The EPUB suits Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers, the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, and the KEPUB is the format Kobo devices handle best. All three hold the same text and the same divisions, with nothing locked, watermarked or limited in time, and nothing to install beyond the app you already read with.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of the Treatise is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, with the Advertisement, the Introduction, the three books, the Appendix and the endnotes complete.
- Complete text in the original divisions Three books, eleven parts and every numbered section, with the headings the edition prints and the section numbers left as Hume arranged them.
- Eleven summaries of the argument One for each book and part, in order, saying what that part establishes and how it hands the argument on to the next.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with no account needed and no reader software beyond the one you already use.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — Hume’s own later rewriting of Book I, shorter and drier — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Leviathan — Hobbes’s book of 1651, named in Book II where Hume argues that human actions follow a general course of nature — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Philosophy Classics — the shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of our free philosophy in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The edition prints the Advertisement and the Introduction, three books, an Appendix and endnotes. Each book is divided into Parts and each Part into numbered Sections; the section headings carry their subjects, and the Parts carry the titles used here. The eleven groups below are the books and parts themselves, in the order Hume arranged them. Nothing has been merged, and no part has been given a name it does not carry in the text. A reader who wants the argument in one view can follow the eleven in order, from the origin of ideas to the confession in the Appendix.
- Book I, Part I — Of Ideas, Their Origin, Composition, Connection, Abstraction: Perceptions divide into impressions and ideas, and every simple idea is copied from a simple impression. Memory and imagination are told apart by vivacity and by liberty; ideas are then joined by resemblance, contiguity and causation, and substance, modes and abstract ideas are resolved into collections of particular qualities and particular ideas used as signs.
- Book I, Part II — Of the Ideas of Space and Time: The mind cannot conceive an infinite division, so the ideas of space and time must be finite and made of indivisible parts. Space is the order of visible or tangible points, time the order of successive moments; the objections are answered one by one, and no idea of a vacuum survives apart from body. Existence, he adds, is not a separate idea.
- Book I, Part III — Of Knowledge and Probability: Knowledge is confined to the relations that depend on the ideas compared; matters of fact rest on causation. No object implies another, so the inference from cause to effect comes from custom, and belief is the liveliness that custom gives the idea. Probability, necessary connection, the rules for judging causes and effects, and the reason of animals follow from the same principle.
- Book I, Part IV — Of the Sceptical and Other Systems of Philosophy: Reason turned on itself destroys its own authority, and the belief in body is traced to the constancy and coherence of impressions and to a fiction of the imagination. The ancient and the modern systems are examined, the immateriality of the soul is dissolved by asking what substance means, and the self turns out to be a bundle. The book closes in melancholy, dispelled by dinner and backgammon.
- Book II, Part I — Of Pride and Humility: Pride and humility need a double relation: an idea of something related to the self, and an impression of independent pleasure or pain. The system is limited, then applied to virtue, beauty, riches and reputation, and the last section extends it to animals. Sympathy is introduced here, to explain why the opinions of others move us as strongly as our own qualities.
- Book II, Part II — Of Love and Hatred: Love and hatred repeat the pattern of the first Part with another person in place of the self. Experiments confirm the system, difficulties are answered, and the compound affections follow: esteem for the rich and powerful, benevolence and anger, compassion and malice, respect and contempt, the love between the sexes, and the same passions in animals.
- Book II, Part III — Of the Will and Direct Passions: The will is defined as the impression we feel when we knowingly give rise to a motion of the body or a perception of the mind. Liberty and necessity are reconciled by the constancy of the union between motives and actions; reason is shown to be the slave of the passions; calm and violent passions, custom, distance, the direct passions and curiosity are then accounted for.
- Book III, Part I — Of Virtue and Vice in General: Moral distinctions are not derived from reason: no comparison of ideas yields an ought, and the same relations can be found in an oak and in parricide. Vice and virtue are felt by a moral sense, as a peculiar pleasure or uneasiness in the survey of a character, and the observation about is and ought closes the section.
- Book III, Part II — Of Justice and Injustice: Justice is an artificial virtue, since no natural motive produces it and a regard to its virtue would be circular. A convention for the stability of possession creates property; the rules of acquisition, transference and promises follow, and then government, allegiance, the law of nations, and the modesty and chastity of women, all traced to the same artifice and to sympathy with the public interest.
- Book III, Part III — Of the Other Virtues and Vices: The natural virtues are traced to four sources: qualities useful or agreeable to others, and useful or agreeable to the person himself. Greatness of mind, goodness and benevolence, natural abilities and cleanliness are tried by that test, and the book closes by arguing that though justice is artificial, the sense of its morality is natural.
- Appendix and Endnotes: The Appendix confesses that two principles will not reconcile: that all distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives a real connection among them. Hume restates belief as a feeling, admits that his account of personal identity is defective, corrects two smaller errors, and leaves the difficulty to later reflection. The endnotes follow.
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · David Hume
