Organised in three parts (Of the Understanding, Of the Passions and Of Morals), with many sub-sections such as “Of Ideas, Their Origin, Composition, Connexion, Abstraction, Etc.” “Of the Ideas of Space and Time” “Of Knowledge and Probability” and “Of the Sceptical and Other Systems of Philosophy Etc”, it concludes with a recapitulation with Hume’s reasoning for his thesis that “sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions”.Īs the first reviews suggest, the Treatise is not for the faint-hearted. Even today, the Treatise is notably dry, and makes few concessions to the reader. In 1740, however, the critics were savage, describing his work as “abstract and unintelligible”. Today, however, Treatise is widely considered to be Hume’s most important work, one of the keystone books of western philosophy, in the words of one commentator, “the founding document of cognitive science” and possibly the “most important philosophical work” in the English language.
He himself later observed that it “fell dead-born from the press”.
Its wit and clarity (“Poets… though liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions”) were overlooked his majestic philosophical rigour misunderstood. The publication of Hume’s Treatise was a disaster. “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” he wrote. In opposition to the rationalists of the day, Hume argued that it was passion rather than reason that moderates human behaviour: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”įrom this position, Hume advanced the idea that human knowledge must ultimately be located in mankind’s quotidian experience. His ambitious intention was to construct a pragmatic science of man, a wholesale system of thought by which to appraise the psychological basis of human nature.
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