So let's now move on to section one for three and one for four of the treaties of the ancient philosophy and of the modern philosophy.
Well of the ancient philosophy is essentially an attack on Aristotelian ism, also known as the peripatetic philosophy.
And what HUME does in this section is criticise them, indeed, rather ridicule them for being overly dependent on the fictions of the imagination.
They get carried away by imaginative fantasies.
They are almost like children or poets in being overly influenced by natural tendencies to invent imaginative fictions.
And here he's picking on substances, substantial forms, accidents and occult qualities.
And these are things which Hume's audience would also have generally thought to be ridiculous.
He's writing for an audience of modern philosophers.
He explains the fictions as arising from the imagination in a very natural way.
But what we ought to do is philosophers is be more critical about what the imagination naturally needs to think.
So I'm judicious philosophers, and he's clearly referring to Locke here, Locke's chapter of our complex ideas of substances.
Consider that our ideas of bodies are nothing but collections formed by the mind of the ideas of the several distinct,
sensible qualities of which objects are composed.
So Locke had said that our ideas of particular substances are made up of the collections of ideas that we have about their properties.
So when we think of gold, for example, we think of a combination of qualities, including the colour, the texture that the mass, the weight and so on.
And now Locke actually, in entitling his chapter of our complex ideas of substances,
he is himself attacking the Aristotelian who had thought that we have a simple idea of substances.
And HUME is essentially here agreeing with Locke, but he's giving an account of how that false idea of simple substances comes about.
The smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought readily deceives the mind and makes us ascribe an identity to the changeable succession.
So we we've seen this from one for two. We see objects gradually changing.
Our imagination overlooks the changes.
And because we naturally think of something as undergoing coherent, gradual changes, we're seduced into thinking of it as a simple continuing thing.
Now. Okay, so we see an object over time changing in small ways, but generally appearing much the same.
And we think of it as one in the same thing that actually implies human things, that it would have to be completely unchanging to preserve identity.
It must be literally the same over time.
Now, obviously, when we think more carefully, we realise that things are actually undergoing changes.
So we have a kind of inconsistency in our thinking. We tend to think of the thing is identical over time and hence absolutely the same over time.
But we realise that externally it's changing.
So we reconcile that contradiction by imagining that some substance underneath the sensible qualities which remains the same.
So again, this is very much the sort of thing that he's been explaining in one for two.
So notice that Hume's discussion in one, four, two,
where he's talking about how we come to have the idea of body is applicable both to the ancient philosophers and the modern philosophers.
He, both the ancient ancients whom he's discussing now, have one particular idea of substance.
We'll see that in the next section of the modern philosophy.
He criticises the modern philosophers such as Locke with their distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
But both of them are subject to the kind of thing, the kind of illusions of the imagination that have been outlined in one for two.
Okay, so the ancient philosophers are ascribing the identity of things to a single simple substance
underlying the objects qualities a principle of union or cohesion amongst those qualities.
But if the substance is simple, if the underlying substance is simple,
how common is it that different instances of these of these material things have different qualities,
for example, different colours, different shape, etc.?
Well, the Aristotelian have to invent something called substantial form, which they bring in to explain that.
And then the qualities which are not essential to the object are ascribed as accidental qualities.
So you get to the notion of accidents, and HUME wants to say that all of these notions are meaningless.
People don't know what they're talking about.
These philosophers propose a substance supporting which they do not understand, and an accident supported of which they have as imperfect an idea.
The whole system, therefore, is entirely incomprehensible.
So he's extremely critical of the ancient philosophy.
Now he goes on to attack the notions of faculty and occult equality.
And here he is, referring back implicitly to his discussion of causation.
So people naturally imagine that they perceive a connection between constantly conjoined objects.
When you see A followed by B again and again, you've seen a unit really expect to be, you feel, as it were, a connection in the mind.
Okay, that's all familiar from treaties one 314.
When we look at the objects themselves, we find no such connection apparent in their qualities.
Now, the just inference to draw, HUME says, is that we have no idea of power or agency separate from the mind and belonging to causes.
That's very similar to what he's been saying at the end of one 340.
But what the ancient philosophers do is invent the words faculty and polity.
They need only say that any phenomenon which puzzles them arises from a faculty or occult quality.
So a well-known example of this is the ridicule that Moliere gives of the notion of qualities in the mallard.
Imagine at one of his plays. And there a doctor is asked, Why does opium make one sleep?
Oh, it's because it has a soporific virtue whose nature it is to stupefied the senses.
So you ask, why does opium make you sleep?
Answer It's got a sleep inducing quality, not explanatory.
And this is the kind of thing that HUME here is ridiculing again.
His audience will be very sympathetic to this.
But among all the instances where in the peripatetic have shown they were guided by every trivial propensity of the imagination.
No one is more remarkable than their sympathies, antipathies and horrors of a vacuum.
There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself.
This inclination, it is true, is suppressed by a little reflection and only takes place in children, poets and the ancient philosophers.
What excuse should we find to justify our philosophers in such signal?
A weakness. So he gives an example of a child who hurts himself on a stone might hit the stone in anger.
So the child is attributing intentions to the stone as though the stone has been naughty for hurting it.
Now, when we grow up, we get past all that sort of thing.
But he's saying essentially that the ancient philosophers, when they talk about sympathies,
antipathies, horrors of a vacuum, they're doing exactly the same thing.
And here he's referring to the basis of Aristotelian science.
Aristotelian science attributes the tendency of stones to fall to a sort of desire, a striving to reach the centre of the universe.
And HUME is saying, actually, this is just like the child who hits the stone.
Now, notice the important phrase there that guided by every trivial propensity of the imagination.
So he's attacking the ancient philosophers for being carried away by these illusions of the imagination.
We will see that this plays an important role in what's to come.
Because he might seem to be inconsistent here.
Remember, think back to the discussion of induction.
HUME asked whether induction is founded on reason,
and he came to the conclusion that it isn't that the foundation of induction is the imagination, it's the custom.
Our tendency after we've seen it followed by B repeatedly when we see an A to extrapolate and expect to be.
And that's not dependent on reason. It's dependent on the imagination.
So how is it fair of HUME to criticise the ancient philosophers for basing their philosophy on the principles of the imagination?
He's doing exactly the same, isn't he? Well, there's a famous passage in which he addresses this.
He distinguishes between two sort of imaginative principles, some of them respectable, some not.
So I'm going to read out this whole passage.
It's a particularly notable one, and it's often been thought to give a sort of key to Hume's answer to scepticism.
We'll see that in the treatise. The answer doesn't quite work, but arguably it is retained in his later work,
and that perhaps does in order to justify myself to explain how my philosophy is not
subject to the objection that I've just given against the ancient philosophers,
I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal,
such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes,
and the principles which are changeable, weak and irregular, such as those I have just now taken notice of.
That is the principles that influenced the ancient philosophers, the former.
That's the ones that are permanent, irresistible and universal are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions so that upon their removal,
human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.
The latter are neither unavoidable to mankind nor necessary, or so much as useful in the conduct of life.
But on the contrary, are observed only to take place in weak minds and being opposite to the other principles
of conduct and reasoning may easily be subverted by due contrast and opposition.
For this reason, the former received by philosophy and the latter rejected.
So he's saying that amongst the principles of the imagination,
there are some that are respectable that we couldn't live without, that are therefore universal.
Everybody has them like induction. So that's okay.
We as philosophers accept those and base our theorising on those.
But there are other ones that are changeable, weak and irregular the kind of thing that makes you assign purposes to a stone.
Those sorts of principles are to be rejected. Now there's an interesting footnote in a earlier book, one part three of the treaties,
a footnote that HUME actually took the trouble to have inserted into the treaties while it was in press.
So he had the footnote put on what's called a cancel sheet to replace the original page.
And he cut out some of the previous text in order to make room for it.
So he obviously thought it was quite important. And this is essentially addressing exactly the same point.
He's distinguishing between two different senses of the imagination.
In one sense, the imagination is the faculty that controls the vivacity of our ideas,
that of to which all the associative principals and so on belong, including custom.
In the other sense, the imagination only concerns those witnesses and prejudices which are rejected
under the appropriate character of being the offspring of the imagination.
So when we criticise people for being carried away by the imagination, we mean it in this other sense.
The sense in which imaginative principles are wins isn't prejudices.
So distinguish between those two senses and human is quite happy to acknowledge that his philosophy is founded on the imagination.
In the formal sense, the broader one.
But he obviously is criticising the ancient philosophers for founding their philosophy on the winds and prejudices.
Sense of the imagination. Okay.
Let's now move on to of the modern philosophy that certainly is wonderful for the modern
philosophy typified by Locke claims could be based much more solidly than the ancient philosophy,
not on windows and prejudices, but on the solid permanence and consistent principles of the imagination.
Now, Q is going to argue that actually it isn't nearly as solid as it might appear.
So a key pillar of the modern philosophy is the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
Secondary qualities are supposed to exist only in the mind. Primary qualities are attributed to objects themselves.
HUME suggests that the only satisfactory argument for drawing that distinction
is to do with variations how things look differently in different contexts.
So the argument is that if different impressions from the same sentence arise from some object.
Suppose an object looks different in different lights or looks different when we're suffering from some disease or.
Tastes differently depending on our situation. And we clearly cannot attribute all of the qualities that we sense to the object.
That would seem to be a contradiction. But on the other hand, our sensory impressions are of the same kind.
I mean, to take an example that Locke gives, suppose one of my hands has been in cold water and one of them in hot water,
and I put my hands into a bowl of warm water and it feels warm to one and cold to the other.
It can't be both warm and sorry. It can't be both hot and cold.
But on the other hand, my impression of hot in my impression of cold, those feelings are of the same kind.
So if they can't both belong to the object, it seems that neither can.
Again, if something looks different colours from different perspectives or in different light,
it can't have both colours because they contradict each other.
But since both impressions are of the same kind, the natural conclusion seems to be that it doesn't have either of them.
Now notice that this is an argument using a causal principle from like effects, we suppose, like we presumed, like causes, and that's quite important.
We'll see that he refers back to it later. So that's the argument that he sees as providing the basis for the primary secondary quality distinction.
If you know Locke, I think you would rather doubt that that's the main argument that Locke is depending on.
But at any rate. HUME, following Berkeley sees the argument, as it were, from illusion or from mistaken perceptions as an important reason for it.
And he follows on with a very Berkeley in objection when the Berkeley objected to Locke
that you couldn't form an idea of a primary quality abstracted from the secondary quality.
Because whenever we see a shape, we see a coloured shape.
You can't actually form an idea, according to Berkeley, in view of a shape that isn't coloured.
And Humes argument is essentially a refinement of that.
He's going to argue that if all the secondary qualities exist only in the mind, not in objects,
you can't actually form an idea of a solid, extended object independent of the mind.
The problem is that the form an idea of an extended body, my idea of extension has to have some content.
I have to have some idea of what it is that is extended.
Now I can get ideas of extension from sight or touch and ultimately from atomic ideas of colour.
Remember the minima from but one part to or simple solid ideas which I get from touch.
But the problem is colour is excluded from any real existence.
In other words, the modern philosophers say that colour is a secondary qualities in the mind, not in objects.
So that won't give you an idea of an external object.
And our idea of solidity is parasitic on our idea of an object.
The idea of solidity is that of two objects which cannot penetrate each other.
So unless you've got something to provide content to the notion of an object,
you cannot form the idea of one object which can't penetrate another one.
You've got to have some independent content to that idea, and you can't get it from the notion of solidity.
Our modern philosophy, therefore, leaves us no, just no satisfactory idea of matter.
So HUME elaborates on this argument at some length, and it's an interesting passage to read.
I recommend that you do. The conclusion is that there is a direct and total opposition betwixt our reason and our senses, or more properly,
betwixt those conclusions we form from cause and effect and those that persuade us of the continued and independent existence of body.
So remember, he had the causal argument that from which we conclude that secondary qualities don't exist outside the mind.
And now he followed that up with an argument that says, without appeal to secondary qualities,
we cannot actually form any coherent idea of an extended body.
So the conclusion of one, four four of the treaties seems profoundly sceptical.
HUME has shown apparently that there is a conflict between two pretty basic parts of our mental capacities.
That is our causal reasoning, without which we can't form any conclusions beyond memory and senses and our belief in an external world.
Okay. Now let's move on to the final parts of one of the treaties.
The soul and the self, which are discussed in one for five and one for six.
And then I'll be finishing off with some words about Hume's conclusion.
So after one fall for him says, right, we're going to leave behind the external world and turn to the internal world.
We found all these contradictions in our thoughts about external objects from one fourth to all those problems about identity,
and now one for four, we find this conflict between causal reasoning and belief in body.
Now let's go on to the world of the mind, the intellectual world.
And HUME says here, we won't find any contradictions like that.
As we will see, that complacent view does not last.
So I'm going to just sketch, first of all, what goes on in one, four, five of the materiality of the.
So it's a section that is widely ignored actually in books on him, which I think is a great shame.
It's actually quite a rich section and it's got some parts in it that are very important.
What I'm going to do now is just give you a very quick guide through what is discussed.
So at the beginning, human attacks, the notion of mental substance, of course, he's already attacked the notion of physical substance.
And the attack is in very much the same spirit. He appeals to the copy principle to deny that there is any impression from which this
idea can be derived and he condemns the notion of mental substance is meaningless.
So the question as to whether our souls, as it were, consist of mental substance is shown to be a meaningless question.
We don't even understand the terms in which it's posed.
Then from one four, five, 7 to 16 human thoughts on the discussion of the location of perceptions and whether perceptions are extended here.
He says quite clearly that the only perceptions that have extension or location are those of sight or touch.
Again, you can see this is linking up with what he said about how we form our ideas of
extension in the context of external body perceptions either of sight or touch.
So other perceptions like smell, for example, has no physical location.
When we experience a smell that is not physically located, not spatially located.
Now, nevertheless, suppose I smell a thing.
I naturally attribute the smell and the taste when I tasted to the physical object itself.
That's an illusion. It's a mistake. We naturally do it because we're so used to associating the physical fig with the taste and the smell.
They come together so often that we naturally attribute the taste and smell as though they were spatially located.
Now, Human actually refers forward to this passage from the discussion of causation.
One three 1425 You'll see those notes there. Footnote 32 When he he says that this illusion is similar to the illusion whereby we spread
our minds on external objects when we attribute causation causal powers to external objects.
So that's a passage which sort of backs up the, the interpretation of human causation as saying that we're making a mistake when
we view causal powers as directly attributed to external objects or attributable.
One for 517 to 28 is a discussion of Spinoza.
It can be a little bit difficult to interpret. It seemed here that HUME is really having some fun at the expense of people who criticise Spinoza.
But Spinoza is widely considered at the time to be an atheist.
He has the hideous hypothesis that the entire world consists of one simple substance God or nature.
But clearly it's not a conventional idea of God. Hence, he is viewed with nearly as much repugnance as Hobbes.
And what HUME does is ingeniously turn the objections against Spinoza, against the idea of a simple soul.
So theologians believe that we have a simple and compounded soul, that the soul is essentially simple.
And we have all these ideas. But those ideas are supposed to be modifications somehow of the simple soul.
Spinoza believes that the world all consists of one simple substance,
and that the objects in the world are modifications of this one simple substance.
So any objections to the latter apply also to the former.
So if it's quite an interesting discussion, I'm not particularly essential, I think, for understanding Hume's philosophy.
As I say, he's more having fun at the expense of certain theologians, in fact, you know, the the conventional orthodoxy at the time.
The most important part of this section comes later. And here he's defending materialism.
So having defended Spinoza, he now goes on to defend Hobbes.
You can see that this is a section not calculated to appeal to Orthodox Christians.
So here he considers the standard argument which many, many philosophers had brought against Hobbs.
Hobbs claimed that everything that exists is material, hence materialist,
and the standard objection was that matter cannot possibly think since you can't have thinking
matter that proves that there must be something more than the material world in particular,
we must have immaterial souls, etc. Locke had used a somewhat similar argument to prove the existence of God.
He said By sort of cosmological reasoning, there must be a first cause.
But the first cause can't be material because matter by itself could not cause thought.
And the arguments based on the the general view that the so much difference between
thought and matter in motion that there's no way the former could arise from the latter.
Well, it seems quite a tempting argument, and yet nothing in the world is more easy than to refute it.
We need only to reflect on what has been proved at large to consider the matter a priori.
Anything may produce anything, and that we shall never discover a reason what any object may or may not be the cause of any other,
however great or however little the resemblance may be between them.
So it's a direct appeal to humans analysis of causation, he said.
Causation is a matter of constant conjunction. That's it.
You don't need a resemblance between cause and effect. And it's an empirical question.
What is constantly conjoined with what? In fact, we find by experience that material motion and thought are constantly conjoined,
which being all the circumstances that enter into the idea of cause and effect.
We may certainly conclude that motion may be and actually is the cause of thought and perception.
Again, a direct appeal to his analysis of causation in terms of constant conjunction.
As the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect,
matter and motion may often be regarded as the causes of thought as far as we have any notion of that relation.
In one for 531, he introduces a dilemma, and in the remainder of the paragraph he argues for the second pawn of the dilemma.
That is very clearly says All objects which we find constantly conjoined are upon that account to be regarded as causes and effects.
When he repeats that later, he says, are upon that account alone to be regarded as causes in effect.
So you establish a constant conjunction that's, you know, that gives you a causal relation that suffices to ascribe causation between them.
So the these end passages, these end paragraphs in one for five are, I think, very significant.
They, together with the discussions of liberty and necessity, are where HUME actually applies the definition of causation that he's given in one 314.
And in both cases, they're in aid of a similar sort of enterprise.
What he's trying to do is vindicate the application of causal reasoning, causal scientific, inductive reasoning to the mental world.
And here what he's saying is there is no conflict between having causal relations between physical things and mental things.
That's fine. It's just a matter of constant conjunction in of liberty and necessity, which we've seen before.
He's using the same analysis of causation to say that necessity applies just
as much to the operations of the mind as it does to the operations of body.
We can have a deterministic science of mind, just like we can have a deterministic science of body.
So one 314 of the treatise, the famous discussion of the idea of necessary connection.
This is where it has the payoff for HUME in supporting materialism, supporting determinism,
bringing empirical science, the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, into the science of the mind.
And that is the subtitle of the treatise, an attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of reasoning into moral subjects.
So this is quite, quite a key part of Hume's philosophy.
But one final thing about one, four or five, there's an interesting mistake at the end of it.
The final paragraph starts off by emphasising Hume's main point.
But then, if you look at the last two sentences, you'll see that he starts referring to the immortality of the soul.
He hasn't said anything about the immortality of the soul. He's been talking about the materiality of the soul.
And suddenly he seems to be referring to arguments which aren't there in the text.
What's going on? Well, we have the essay of The Immortality of the Soul, which HUME nearly published in 1755, but then suppressed.
And it ended up being published only after his death. He'd left it for posthumous publication.
It was too dangerous. It's an excellent essay.
Lovely. The epitome of Hume's philosophy applied to the question of the immortality of the soul.
Well, in a letter to Henry HUME, who later became Lord Keynes in 1737, HUME said,
I am at present castrating my work that is cutting off its noble parts in order that it shouldn't give offence.
Because he wanted to give the treatise to Joseph Butler, Bishop Joseph Butler and others in the hope of getting, as it were, a good report.
So he cut out various religious discussions, probably of something a predecessor of of miracles, which later turned up in the enquiry Section ten.
And it seems almost certain that HUME had this at some point in the treatise in the manuscript.
He his discussion of immortality or something like it was there.
Okay. Let's now move on to the penultimate section of book, one of the treaties, famous section of personal identity.
So first of all, who wields the coffee principle to deny that we have any idea of the self,
which is anything like the sort of standard notion the self is supposed to have perfect identity and simplicity?
Well, when we look inside ourselves, look at the impressions that we get.
We don't find any impression that corresponds to that kind of idea.
So there's no way that we can have a legitimate idea of the self of that kind.
When I look inside myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.
So this drives us to Hume's famous bundle Theory of the Self, or at least the bundle theory of our Idea of the self.
Now think back to what Kim said about the idea of substance.
He criticised those who think we have some simple idea of substance.
The ancient philosophers, for example. But at the same point, he praised Locke for saying that we have a complex ideas of substances,
that our ideas of substances, as it were, and an amalgam of all the various qualities that we attribute to it.
And he seems to be saying something similar here about the idea of the self.
The legitimate idea of the self is not simple and uniform.
It's the idea of a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed
each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement.
So that's the bundle theory for which he is very famous.
So the rest of the section is devoted largely to explaining how it is that we are led to attribute an identity to the self.
And he's going along very similar moves to those that we saw in one or two of scepticism with regard to the senses.
Just as when we look at external objects and we find that they exhibit constancy and coherence,
we are seduced by that into thinking of them as persisting identical things.
Even though strictly something can't be identical over time unless it's completely unchanging.
Our imagination seduces us into making that mistake.
And now he's going to say that our idea of the self likewise arises from a similar cause.
So he's going to explain our pretension to ascribe an identity to these successive
perceptions and to suppose ourselves possessed of an invariable and uninterrupted existence.
Think about when we attribute identity to plants and animals.
Plants change over time, but they change slowly, so we naturally mistake the gradual change for a continuing identity.
Again, I don't think that humans discussion of identity, frankly, is his strongest philosophical card.
He does, as I mentioned before, tend to just assume that identity over time can only make sense if you have unchanged ability.
And that seems to me, at any rate, to be something of a confusion between numerical identity and similarity.
In his later works, HUME does not discuss the notion of identity.
This kind of thing disappears.
And so I personally am inclined to think that it's his view about identity is not, as it were, part of his long term settled view.
Anyway, here he's going to say very similar things about personal identity to what he says about external objects.
So I say we we see gradual change, a kind of constancy and coherence, and that naturally leads us to think that there's something identical there.
We realise that that's absurd when we actually have noticed that it's changed.
The thing has changed a lot over time. We look at a plant in one season and then another season.
I don't know. It's actually very different.
So we feign some new and unintelligible principle that binds the things together and when we do that kind of thing,
in the case of personal identity, that's how we run into the notion of a soul and self and substance.
So again, we've got that notion of substance. The notion of substance.
HUME is suggesting, at least when it's thought of something simple and continuing, arises from this kind of imaginative mistake.
So to prove this hypothesis of how we come to ascribe personal identity,
HUME sets out to show that the objects which are variable or interrupted and yet are supposed to
continue the same are such only as consist of a succession of parts connected together by resemblance,
contiguity or causation. In other words, by the associative principles of the mind,
remember resemblance contiguity causation humans identified way back in book one part one as the three principles of association of ideas.
And he goes on to illustrate this. He talks about the circumstances in which in which we most naturally attribute identity to things.
When changes are gradual, when they are proportionately small, at least at a time,
and when things serve to some common end or purpose, he gives an example.
Suppose there's a church built somewhere, an old church, and it falls down,
or it's knocked down and then replaced by another church because they're serving the same purpose,
providing a church for a particular town or village. We naturally talk of them as the same church, even though they clearly aren't.
So when we attribute personal identity, it's just one more example of the same kind of thing.
Obviously all this is saying that the attribute attribution of personal identity that we make is standardly mistaken.
If we think of personal identity as involving any more than that bundle, we're actually making a mistake.
But to justify the claim that it is a mistake, HUME again emphasises, Look inside yourself.
You won't actually see any real connection between those perceptions.
So our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas.
Now, this might seem puzzling. You might think, well, look, if there's a train of connected ideas, what is it that's being seduced into this illusion?
Doesn't there have to be an identical person who is suffering, as it were,
this seduction in order to be in order to be confused into attributing identity?
Doesn't that have to be an eye that is being confused?
And you can see that this sort of thing leads to real big questions about what's going on in humans account of personal identity.
So a lot of secondary literature is a attribute.
Some of the problems that HUME has to that kind of thought.
What you seems to be doing is explaining the genesis of a particular mistake, an idea of personal identity.
And I think if you take it in that way, you don't have to read him as fundamentally confused here.
So he talks about resemblance and causation and how they give rise to the idea.
And he explains why memory is particularly key.
Memory produces resemblance between our perceptions. When I remember something, the perception, the memory perception that arises in my mind,
the idea of memory is very resembling to the thing of which it's a memory.
And when we are concerned about our future, we think about the future that brings up emotions which are causally connected with the future.
So there are resembling and causal connections and both of these are largely mediated by the memory.
So it's no surprise that Locke saw memory as the key to personal identity, that humans insistent that memory isn't the whole thing.
It's not that memory makes personal identity.
It partly does, but it also discovers personal identity.
There is this connection, causal connection, associative connections between our ideas and impressions and memory reveals that.
Now his theory of personal identity has given rise to very complex and protracted discussions in the secondary literature.
Perhaps the main reason for this is that in the appendix to the treaty,
so this is published just 21 months later, is published together with Book three of the treaties.
HUME says, Oh, dear. My account of personal identity won't work.
Upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involved in such a labyrinth that I must confess,
I neither know how to correct my former opinions nor how to render them consistent.
Now, it would be nice if HUME at this point had taken the trouble to spell out exactly what the problem is.
But he doesn't do that. Or at least the spelling out that he gives is extremely confusing.
So it has become something of a an industry amongst HUME scholars to speculate on what is going on.
You get probably as many different accounts of this as there are commentators.
In short, there are two principles which I cannot render consistent, nor is it in my power to renounce either of them,
which is that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences.
No contradiction between those two. So why is it his why is he saying but he has such a difficulty in rendering them consistent?
Well, I don't propose to go into that. But be aware, if you read Human Personal Identity,
a lot of the intricacies of those discussions are driven by trying to make sense of what
he says here and fitting it in with what is actually in the section of personal identity.
So to finish off, let's look very briefly at another very complex section Treaties 147 conclusion of this book.
What makes this very hard to understand is that it's very dynamic,
seems to go through a sequence of thoughts and a sequence of emotional changes with those thoughts going from despair to optimism to complacency.
Most of our mental processes have been shown to be dependent on the imagination,
but the imagination seems rather inconstant, something that we do not want to rely on.
And in fact, treaties one, four, four has found a manifest contradiction between two aspects of our imaginative thought.
One of them to do with causal reasoning and one of them to do with our belief in the continued existence of matter.
We've got that contradiction from the section of the modern philosophy.
We've also got confusion about the notion of causation as revealed at one 314.
So HUME is referring back quite explicitly, usually with footnotes to these various sections.
That leads us into a dangerous dilemma. If we assent to every trivial suggestion of the fantasy, the imagination,
if we follow all the different imaginative principles will be led into contradiction.
Moreover, it will also give us ridiculous views like those of the ancient philosophers.
So we do not want to follow all the different principles of the imagination.
How are we going to choose which to follow?
Well, the natural thing to do is to say, let's just adhere to the general, more established principles of the imagination,
the ones that in that famous passage at the beginning of one, four, four,
he had used to distinguish his reliance on the imagination from that of the ancient philosophers.
The ancient philosophers allowed themselves to be pulled around by all these trivial suggestions of the imagination.
Whereas HUME himself only relies on the general to more establish the causal reasoning.
Or at least that's what it seems at that point. The trouble is, if you think back to one for one of scepticism with regard to reason.
HUME has said that the only thing that stops us degenerating into total scepticism about everything
is unfortunately a trivial suggestion of the imagination or a trivial propensity of the imagination,
namely that when we go through a complex argument, we lose track of it.
That's pretty trivial, or it looks that way. So Hume's left at the end of book one of the treaties with a real problem.
It seemed like we had a way of resolving it, of going for the general, more established principles of the imagination, going with causal reasoning,
with induction and so forth, and putting aside the things that lead towards the fictions of the ancient philosophers.
But one for one casts very serious doubt on that. And it seems in one for seven, it's a complex matter that many different interpretations have.
Many different views on this section haven't. There's no this isn't the place to discuss that at length.
But it seems that Hume's answer to scepticism in the treatise comes down to the same sorts of thing that he was saying at the end of one for two,
when he said that carelessness and inattention provide the only remedy.
Again, a famous passage I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and the Mary with my friends.
And afterwards these speculations appear so cold and strained and ridiculous then that I cannot find it in my heart to enter them any farther.
It looks in the treaties as though HUME thinks there is no satisfactory philosophical answer to all these sceptical problems.
We just have to leave them behind us when we go out of the study, dine, play a game of backgammon and so forth.
I think HUME gets much closer to a satisfactory answer in the inquiry.
If you look at Section 12 of the inquiry, particularly,
that is Hume's mature discussion of scepticism, and then he comes to a much more satisfactory view.
He's left behind the problems about identity. He no longer has that argument about scepticism with regard to reason, and as a result,
he is able to rely on causation and induction the general more established principles
of the imagination without running into inconsistency or total scepticism.
Okay. Thank you.