- Human understanding must be drawn from experience. All the materials of
thinking – perceptions – are derived either from sensations or from reflection.
Although ‘reflection’ will generate complex ideas, which we do not directly
experience, all such ideas are combinations of simple sensations. If philosophers
use a term, such as ‘cause’ or ‘freedom’, then we can test whether it has any
meaning by breaking the idea down to its simple sensations, or ‘impressions’. - Simple impressions must be connected together, or ‘associated’. At any moment
there is a great deal going on in a person’s mind, but you cannot reason if the
contents of your mind are arbitrary: you need to connect, or associate, ideas.
There are three principles of association: resemblance, contiguity and causation.
The last is problematic because it takes us beyond experience: Johnny throws a
brick through the window and so ‘causes’ the window to break, but all we see
are Johnny and his body movements, the trajectory of the brick and the breaking
window. - We attribute causes to events on the basis of experience and, more specifically,
habit. For example, we grasp the causal properties of gravity by observing falling
objects. Beliefs are built on habits, but a belief is itself a sensation and not
something external to experience. Although every occurrence is a simple, or
unique, sensation, the observation of repetition creates an ‘internal impression’,
or reflection.
In summary, we can say that what Hume rejects is the idea that ‘reason’
transcends, or goes beyond, what can be observed. To grasp the political significance
of this rejection we need to consider Hume’s moral philosophy. Morality is
concerned with action, but not simply action, for a person’s motives or ‘reasons for
action’ are important in assessing whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad.
In keeping with his emphasis on experience as the basis of knowledge, and applying
it to action, Hume argues that any assessment of a person’s actions, and that
person’s own assessment of what she should do, cannot be based on something
which transcends experience. Indeed, reasoning about what should be done is itself
severely limited: one can at best assess the most effective means to a given end, but
the end itself is beyond assessment. If Jane wants to murder John, then reason can
be used to determine the most effective means – shooting, poisoning, strangulation
and so on – but it cannot be employed to assess the end itself, that is, whether Jane
ought to kill John. Hume is not arguing that murder is acceptable, but rather that
what stops Jane murdering John is sentiment: to twenty-first-century ears this word
has slightly saccharine overtones, but in the eighteenth century it was an important
philosophical concept. A sentiment is a pre-rational feeling towards somebody or
something. Against Hobbes’s theory, Hume does not believe that human beings are
motivated purely by self-interest, but rather their sentiments are limited: they are
concerned with their own interests, or those very close to them, such as family, but
they are capable of sympathy, and so are moved to act in ways beneficial to other
people.
Human beings’ motives are mixed: although they are self-interested they are
capable of limited sacrifices of their own self-interest for the benefit of others, and
it is important that such beneficence is based on sympathy rather than being
concealed self-interest. In Hobbes’s political theory, although each person was better
off under a – any – state than under no state, the absence of genuine moral sentiments
198 Part 2 Classical ideologies