A Treatise on Human Nature (1)

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General Books LLC, 2009 - 430 pages
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1882. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... it is observed 1 Hume evades this question; Still, he is a long way off the Inductive Logic, which supposes an objective sequence. compatibility with the desired reduction may disappear. The great obstacle to such assimilation lies in that opposition to the mere sequence of feelings which causation as ' matter of fact'--as that in discovering which we 'discover the real existence and relations of objects '--purports to carry with it. Why do we set aside our usual experience as delusive in contrast with the exceptional experience of the laboratory--why do we decide that an event which has seemed to happen cannot really have happened, because under the given conditions no adequate cause of it could have been operative--if the relation of cause and effect is itself merely a succession of seemings, repeated so often as to leave behind it a lively expectation of its recurrence? This question, once fairly put, cannot be answered: it can only be evaded. It is Hume's method of evasion that we have now more particularly to notice. 320. In its detailed statement it is very different from the method adopted in those modern treatises of Logic which, beginning with the doctrine that facts are merely feelings in the constitution of which thought has no share, still contrive to make free use in their logical canon of the antithesis between the real and apparent. The key to this modern method is to be found in its ambiguous use of the term 'phenomenon, ' alike for the feeling as it is felt, 'perishing ' when it ceases to be felt, and for the feeling as it is for a thinking subject--a qualifying and qualified element in a permanent world. Only if facts were 'phenomena' in the former sense would the antithesis between facts and conceptions be valid; only if 'phenomena' are underst...

About the author (2009)

David Hume (1711-1776), along with Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, was one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. His writings, which encompass philosophy, economics, and history, include "A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays, Moral and Political; and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

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